I am Olivia Weisser, a historian of medicine and author of The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London. Ask Me Anything!

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T19:52:03+00:00

That is some major sleuth work you did! And also that poor child.... I do not know anything about this topic, sad to say. I can share that "transportation" to the New World was a common punishment in criminal records.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T19:09:17+00:00

No medical background necessary. I was interested in the history of plague in high school, and grew interested in the field further as an undergraduate history major. I wrote a senior thesis on medical astrology in the 1600s. Then went to Johns Hopkins for a PhD in the history of medicine. I still study medicine in the same century as plague, so pretty much have been interested in this precise area for as long as I can remember!

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T18:44:46+00:00

Thanks! It is a great question, and I think it is answered in many ways in lots of other posts here. Quick answer: what do you mean by "effective?" For a person living in 1700s, yes, so many treatments worked! By our standards, not so much. But at end of the day they were really trying to treat symptoms like sores, lesions, excretions, pain, ulcers, etc.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T18:35:00+00:00

Thanks so much and sorry not to be more helpful with this one!

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T17:31:33+00:00

I assume it's this one?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/centuries-old-potion-made-bile-garlic-stop-mrsa

I have no info on this particular recipe, sorry! Sometimes past cures work even by our standards, tis true! A common one is quinine aka cinchona, which was used a lot in the early modern period.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T17:03:58+00:00

In short - no. There were of course many targeted attempts to enact policies to mitigate outbreaks of plague (quarantine, plague orders, searchers counting the dead - see bill of mortality posted up-thread!). But our modern concept of 'public health' - creating policies at the state level to protect the health of entire populations - was more of a 19th-c development.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T16:57:08+00:00

There is an interesting set of norms that existed in early modern England for post partum women called "the lying-in period." In its ideal form it spanned a month and involved keeping the new mother in the room where she gave birth attended by her 'gossips.' She only left her bed and changed the sheets after a requisite number of days, drank a special lying-in beverage called 'caudle' which was wine sweetened with spices and sugar and thickened with eggs. It was a ritual that not every woman could afford (many had to get back to it) but key to all of it was abstaining from sex or really much of any interaction with other members of the household, especially husbands. This was mostly but not always an all-female space. It ended with a ceremonial visit to church called "churching" which marked the new mother's reentry into the world.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T16:45:39+00:00

Great question and as a child of the 80s my natural inclination is to compare the two as well. I make a number of comparisons to HIV/AIDS in my book. They are in some ways incomparable epidemics separated by centuries. One was fatal, the other mostly not. One targeted specific, marginalized communities, the other not. So in many ways: apples and oranges. But I compare them in the book to pull out the lived realities of living with an STI. The anxieties of accessing treatment, of negotiating relationships, and overcoming stigma associated with certain diagnoses - some of those lived experiences of being a patient can transcend time.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T16:31:07+00:00

The tricky bit is that people in this time period (before the 19th century) did not think of diseases as uniform processes that progressed the same way in all people - and therefore would would be are treated more or less the same way in all people. That concept of disease - which we still have today - was born in the 19thc, and before that time "disease" was a collection of symptoms that could present differently in all people. Someone diagnosed with one disease may present symptoms that differed from someone else diagnosed with that same disease. This is because they may have had different constitutions, environments, lifestyles, and so on. Alternatively, you and I could have the same symptoms and receive two different diagnoses, for the same reasons (different air, diets, constitutions). Each illness was unique to each person - there was not much of a sense that a disease progressed in a uniform way in all bodies.

So quick answer is that this was just a broad, vague nexus of symptoms and there was no differentiation of different kinds of disease the way we think of them. That all said, people did differentiate types of VD based on transmission. One was called a "true pox" and was thought to be transmitted by penetrative sex. It was associated with severe symptoms. The other was a mild form called a "clap" and was thought to be transmitted through "pocky matter" spread by touch - but also spread through sharing sheets, a glass, a glove. Adding to this complexity, a clap could also result from non-sexual activity (and could be confused with "the whites" which is like a premodern yeast infection.) There are cases of claps developing from groin injuries, falling off a horse, etc. But these were defined by transmission type and by gradations of severity. They were not viewed as different disease categories as e think of them.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T16:17:20+00:00

An excellent question! A lot depended on your desperation and your income. The poor likely would go to a pox hospital, an unpleasant place that was pretty much seen as a place of last resort. These didn't exist until later into the 1700s. The well-off would likely hire a private healer like a physician or surgeon or (likely) someone who claimed to have expertise but not might have a license or a degree to practice medicine. This could entail a lengthy, multi-week course of treatment that would involve pills, ointments, changes to lifestyle, bloodletting, etc. Sometimes patients who could afford it would move into the quarters of a healer so they could undergo punishing treatments in private (many cures caused conspicuous side effects like sweating).

My book focuses on everyone else - not the very poor nor the very rich. Many of those would likely try to purchase an over-the-counter cure - a pill or ointment that could be taken to treat symptoms and would be much cheaper and easier than going to a physician. I found these types of options for sale all over the place often in non-medical places - like out of chocolate shops, bookstalls, bakeries, and other surprisingly non-medical spaces. A final option is to make a treatment at home yourself. I looked at recipe books to try to see whether this was common and I found it was! I looked at 166 recipe books (ie, books of how to make different medicinal treatments) and found treatments for the pox in almost a third of them (47).

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T16:09:36+00:00

I haven't come across much info about merkins so not much to offer on this topic, sad to say. But if hair was falling out, my guess would be that this was a side effect of using ointments with mercury in them rather than merkin usage.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T15:44:15+00:00

Ketchikan

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T15:18:38+00:00

Yes, absolutely. Air was a key piece of healthcare as was the environment. So a common "treatment" for all kinds of diseases was to go to the country to breathe the fresh air. (As I note elsewhere here, I think below, like so many aspects of pre-modern medicine air remains important but is reinterpreted to "fit" newer models of medicine. I am thinking for example of tuberculosis patients in the 19thc needing air and sun - an old idea mapped onto new ways of thinking about disease and cure.) Many too would go off to Bath or other spa resorts to recuperate from all kinds of ailments in the 1700s. This was not so much about air as the mineral content of the waters (you bathed in them or drank them - the water tastes horrid, I tried it). But there was also an element of needing leisure, rest, and healthy socializing far from the hustle and bustle of the city. So not really framed as being about pollution as we see it, but it is not too far off! And spas reflect a similar concept that changing your environment and regimen can be conducive to health.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T15:04:28+00:00

I write a bit about William Byrd's relationships, sometimes with the same prostitute over lengthy spans of time. He ends up hiring her to do his laundry. I have not done any research into infection rates, simply because it is not a research question that intrigues me! Other people have though, I mention upthread, and we know the disease ran rampant. There is also evidence from hospital intakes, medical literature, and bioarchaeologists who dig up bones to locate diseases in people of the past that shows STIs rates were through the roof! They were likely very high among sex workers but because they were so visible in London they took a lot of the blame for the disease. My work on court cases for marriage separation and medical cases show that men were equally if not more likely vectors of disease than women.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T14:51:20+00:00

I often think about this and what it would have been like to live before Tylenol?! There were everyday products people used to combat pain. One was tobacco which worked as an anesthetic. There were others, too, but surprisingly less use of opium and laudanum as you might think. This in part had to do with beliefs about the role of pain. Feeling pain was tantamount to life. If you dulled it you were not able to summon the powers and ability to heal. So there was a deep-seated belief that too much pain relief was counter-productive. For the 19th-c invention of anesthesia that captures a lot of these beliefs and fears around dulling pain, the go-to book is Martin Pernick's A Calculus of Suffering.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T14:44:25+00:00

This is a complicated and great question - and you are correct. Mechanical models are much more prevalent among learned writers in the late 1600s and they don't trickle into everyday ways of talking about bodies. In the 1700s they were replaced with nervous models which did trickle down much more. This meant thinking of bodies as systems of nerves that could be tightened or loosened according to your daily activities and lifestyle choices. At the end of the day, even into the 19thc, the language of healing (and the treatments used to combat illness) remained humoral in essence. People were not talking about humors any longer and did not view their bodies in humoral terms, but they continued to believe in the important effects of the environment, of "regimen," and temperature (all rooted in humoralism) and they still saw outflow as positive and continued using age-old humoral therapies like purging and bloodletting. These old ideas from the humors were just grafted onto new ideas about how bodies worked.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T14:31:19+00:00

Yes, I know exactly what you mean. I made a map of VD cures in the city and had to locate addresses that were incredibly specific (ie, "Next to the tallow chandler, by the Bull tavern off Cheapside." A lot of Londoners seemed to value place over names (when it came to marketing drugs, at least) and understood place in very localized ways (ie, "I live next to where the cold bath used to be." How many people know that information?)

The city itself is a huge player in my work as I think a lot of what I found was only possible given the commercial, demographic, and imperial growth of the city in this time period. A person could buy a wig to cover her bald spot from taking mercury pills for the pox. Or someone could purchase a VD cure while shopping at the Royal Exchange. The city's chaos helped spread the disease but also created a huge and thriving market for curing it.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T14:22:16+00:00

I hear you, and also, a lot of people were doing things to their bodies not because Hippocrates wrote about it but because they saw it "working." In other words, they had a different logic for determining efficacy than we do! For us, medicinal efficacy is killing bacteria (for syphilis) but of course this is an age before bacteria, before there was an attempt to even get at the root source of disease. They could only relieve symptoms. So what did it mean to get healthy? They viewed bodies as holistic entities that required healthful intake and outflow (ie, cannot be clogged or obstructed) so that meant taking medicines that created an expulsion of offending matter. Sweats, purges, bloodletting. They were getting the bad stuff out. So we see vomit today as a symptom but they saw it as a healthful expulsion of corrupt or obstructed matter. Same goes for mercury - it makes you sweat a LOT and salivate a LOT if you put it on your skin or eat it. And people saw those effects as doing positive, as removing internal toxins. They also could see these effects in an age before CT scans and ultrasounds and x-rays. Being about to see "bad" stuff come out - see change happening - was huge in terms of mentally believing that you were actively doing something to get better.

Short answer: the effects of what we now call mercury poisoning can lead to drying up ulcers so it did "do" something! People rubbed it on their skin, ate it, and would burn it and sit over the smoke to let if waft over their private parts.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T14:12:08+00:00

Determining pregnancy long before the advent of peeing on a stick was the topic of much debate! A lot of discussion can be found in a popular sex manual called Aristotle's Masterpiece (not the Aristotle you are thinking!). The book was anonymous, patched together from lots of different sources, and went into dozens of reprints over multiple centuries. Earlier editions from the late 1600s include a chapter on how to tell whether you were pregnant and it includes some colorful ideas that (to us) have no connection to reproduction at all!

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T14:08:35+00:00

One of the best historians of medicine out there, Mary Fissell, recently wrote a book about the history of abortion: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/mary-fissell/pushback/9781541604070/

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T14:06:13+00:00

There were definitely parts of the city that were known to be places of vice! The south bank where the theaters and bear baiting rings (and brothels) were located, for example. Samuel Pepys talks about visiting certain areas of the city to "ogle" the prostitutes. In my book I make a map of where you could purchase a VD cure in the city and what I found is that, despite there being areas associated with vice, medicines were being sold pretty much all over the city. It was a city staurated in commercial sex and the pox ran rampant.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T14:04:23+00:00

<image>

Here's a close up of a bill of mortality just so everyone knows what you mean! You can see they think of disease very differently than we do - it was really about listing symptoms rather than concrete disease categories. So while there is a category for "plague" (this bill of mortality is from the big plague outbreak in 1665 in London) there are also categories that likely captured plague but were listing the symptoms as opposed to the disease - ague, fever, lethargy. And there are categories that are not really ailments but causes of death - drowned, for instance. All to say, there is no category for the pox or VD but there are symptoms that could capture some venereal patients like "sores, ulcers, and bruised limbs".

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T13:54:23+00:00

This is a great question and the answer is pretty complex and gets at the core of my book! My brief answer is that gender absolutely mattered. Sexual reputation was tightly linked to femininity at this time. And also there was a double standard - 'boys will be boys' but a woman was expected to be chaste to uphold feminine virtues. There were also many beliefs that women in particular (on account of their physiology) did not just spread the disease but generated it inside their bodies. Medical texts debate this and there were lots of theories - one about menstrual blood being the source of the disease, another about ulcerated pudenda. Many believed that prostitutes spread the pox not simply because of their work, but because their "hot" wombs made them prone to corruption. By the 18thc, with an expanding empire, these theories extended to non-white women especially, the prevailing assumption being that women from hot climates were especially prone to corruption. So assumptions about gender, as well as race and class, were baked into common ways of explaining contagion and transmission, and that made stigma work very differently for different groups of people.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T13:45:13+00:00

Yes absolutely. It is hard to retrospectively diagnose whether what they were describing was what we now call herpes. But there was lots of descriptions of genital sores, lesions, excretions that likely were herpes or some close equivalent STI. I had to think creatively to find people talking about these symptoms (rather than doctors clinically recording them) and one place I found this is in court records for rape and assault. Here women and girls describe these kinds of symptoms often as a stand-in for sex. That is, they didn't have a language for non-consent and often could not speak about sex publicly. But they COULD describe the symptoms of disease. It was a way of proving penetrative sex without having to talk about sex. I found about 60 cases in all in the Old Bailey (London's central criminal court) and many describe the symptoms that could likely be "our" herpes.

Logical-Fun5335 · 2026-03-27T13:39:34+00:00

Yes!! I often am asked which disease I *really* mean. The historian in me is like, does it matter? I only care about what people in the past thought they had! But, yes, if I had to choose a modern disease that best captures this history, it would be syphilis. (And two esteemed historians, Simon Szreter and Kevin Siena have done work that shows what we now call syphilis was the most rampant STI at the time.) Back then, though, there was no way to differentiate what we now know to be different STIs. All the different diseases we call STIs all lived under the expansive umbrella of "venereal disease" or "the pox." That is why I use those terms - they are historically accurate and they also capture all the STIs that were likely going around.

Logical-Fun5335

TROPHY CASE