Syphilis and Subjectivity

From the Victorians to the Present

Kari Nixon, Lorenzo Servitje, Kari Nixon, Lorenzo Servitje

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319663678
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book demystifies the cultural work of syphilis from the late nineteenth century to the present. By interrogating the motivations that engender habits of belief, thought, and conduct regarding the disease and notions of the self, this interdisciplinary volume investigates constructions of syphilis that had a significant role in shaping modern subjectivity. Chapters draw from a variety of scholarly methods, such as cultural and literary studies, sociology, and anthropology. Authors unravel the representations and influence of syphilis in various cultural forms: cartography, medical writings, literature, historical periodicals, and contemporary popular discourses such as internet forums and electronic news media.
Exploring the ways syphilitic rhetoric responds to, generates, or threatens social systems and cultural capital offers a method by which we can better understand the geographies of blame that are central to the conceptual heritage of the disease. This unique volume will appeal to students and scholars in the medical humanities, medical sociology, the history of medicine, and Victorian and modernist studies.

Part I
Structuring Syphilis

© The Author(s) 2018

Kari Nixon and Lorenzo Servitje (eds.)Syphilis and Subjectivity https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66367-8_2

Begin Abstract

Medical Mappings of Syphilis in the Late Nineteenth Century

Monika Pietrzak-Franger¹

(1)

Universität Hamburg Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Hamburg, Germany

Monika Pietrzak-Franger

End Abstract

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, civilization and syphilization were brought together in the European mind. In Charles Louis Philippe’s Bubu de Montparnasse (1901), frustrated, syphilitic and desirous bodies become fused with the urban spaces of Paris. In an unremitting frenzy, they evolve into the stuff of the metropolis. When Bubu, the eponymous protagonist, leaves a bar after an orgy of absinthe, he sees the world as himself (Philippe 2006, 22): “The world was like a man, innocent and pox-ridden, drinking absinthe on the terrace of a café” (Philippe 2006, 43). This hallucinatory vision is a gasp of relief that Bubu feels after his panic and inflated fear are attenuated when he realizes that his condition is quite common. Until recently, investigating syphilis mappings has been part of more general projects concerned with the geographical dimensions of sexual politics. Recent scholarship has spotlighted the local specificity of regulatory directives, positioned them in relation to continental projects and inspected their geographical patterns along with tracing their historical development and their function in more general gender, class and racial conflicts, and with reference to British nationalist and imperialist ambitions. Certain places have gained particular significance in these inquiries: colonies as a cradle of contagion; cantonments, brothels, docklands and ports as local spaces of principal visibility; lock hospitals as junctions of broader geopolitical networks. In these studies, the flow of bodies, their spatial distribution and disciplinary targeting have gained particular importance. Within this scholarship, the significance of medical geographies of syphilis has seldom been addressed. Incorporating these materials redirects the discussion and points to the transformation in the preventive measures directed at the disease, which, as in Philippe’s novel, seems to have infected the whole world.¹

The assertion that “[t]he world was like a man, innocent and pox-ridden” also seems to have served as a motto to the late nineteenth-century medical books, which began to map out the dangers of the disease despite the apparent decrease in its severity and incidence.² From the mid-century onwards, medical publications were engaged in the geopolitics of syphilis. Following a heightened historicist impulse, they set out to determine the geographical origin of the disease while also outlining the dangerous spaces of its current spread. Medical men of all sorts began to trace synchronic and diachronic maps of the disease, both of which had an identification and comparison of syphilis sites at their core. The study of syphilis etymology highlighted historical geographies of blame, which were fundamental to the conceptual heritage of the disease.³ It spotlighted the extent to which the relationships between mobility, proximity and geopolitical borders were central to the perception of syphilis. In historical debates, which pivoted around the question of the pre-Columbian origin of syphilis, the presumed site of its origination was juxtaposed with a number of localities where its prevalence had been recorded. The new discipline of forensic archaeology padded the search for the ‘primeval’ site of the disease. Texts and bones were the objects of its study: historical geography of syphilis was thus mapped out on the terrain where corporeality, textuality, temporality and space were conjoined. Synchronic mappings of syphilis, on the other hand, were based on the identification of the prime sites of its incidence in the nineteenth century. At the time when, apart from venereal syphilis, medical practitioners recognized the existence of non-venereal and endemic types of the disease, such attempts were a means of communicating the dangers of syphilis transmission as well as of voicing one’s own political position regarding the modes of its prevention. With the advent of modernity , with new means of transportation, changing urban landscape and new forms of capitalized labour, the disease threatened to destabilize existing material and social orders.

Taking into consideration medical publications on venereal and non-venereal syphilis, I argue that the post-1850s insistence on an ‘innocent’ spread of the disease betrays larger fears fuelled by transformations brought about by modernity . In the context of new production and consumption modes, in which syphilis became divorced from the sexual act and extended over (intimate) relations, any sort of exchange became pathologized and served to outline the perils of modernity . Together with medical maps of syphilis, these debates articulated the necessity of replacing the grand-scale isolationist projects with nuanced exercises in civic responsibility as the chief means in syphilis control.

Medical Mapping Practices

The rhetoric of proximity was instrumental to syphilis prophylaxis. In his popular compendium Syphilis of the Innocent (1894), Duncan L. Bulkley, physician to the New York Skin and Cancer Hospital, divides syphilis into syphilis parvorum (venereal syphilis) resulting from illegitimate sexual relations and syphilis insontium (syphilis of the innocent), acquired either during legitimate sexual intercourse or as a result of non-venereal or hereditary transmission. This cultural-moralist differentiation is accompanied by the distinction between sporadic, epidemic and endemic types of the disease, where the latter refers to geographically specific variations of the disease such as yaws (Bulkley 1894, 17). Although there was no unanimity concerning these divisions, medical literature distinguished between the innocent and the venereal transmission of the disease, which, although tentative, produced various geographies of syphilis and activated differing scripts of sexuality (cf. Pietrzak-Franger 2017, 34). Despite a number of discrepancies, these geopolitical projects used mobility and social interaction as the basis for the preventive policies they supported.

Irrespective of their political persuasion and various explanatory models they activated, the authors outlining the distribution of endemic syphilis offered hierarchical maps of its distribution. Such visual and textual maps established a relationship among geographical dimensions, morality and the degree of cultural development. In his classic The Geography of Disease (1903), Frank Clemow, for instance, regards syphilis as prevalent in nations “whose moral views do not prevent promiscuous and uncontrolled sexual intercourse” and who are “ignorant of the infectivity” of venereal diseases (1903, 432). Racial and class distinctions are thus inscribed on the map of the world distribution of syphilis. In this context, Laura Engelstein’s argument that, in its endemic form, “syphilis served Europeans as an exact index of cultural deprivation” (1986, 1038) should be further qualified to include racial differences. In these writings, race and class were combined with alleged patterns of knowledge distribution in such a way as to ensure a degree of imperial mobility and attenuate the fears of travelling in the tropics while warning against too close a socialization with the native races.

Historical and geographical patterns of mobility were likewise central to the studies in the distribution of venereal syphilis. In a strong intertextual gesture, such geographies were based on previous publications. In Syphilis (1895), Alfred Cooper divides the map of syphilis incidence into Europe , Asiatic Countries, Africa and America, the latter of which he discusses together. His inability to clearly qualify the occurrence of the disease and to underscore its geographical differences is striking. Although he professes to “show that great differences exist with regard to the frequency of its appearance and the intensity of its symptoms” (1895, 11), this diversity, with a few exceptions, disappears in his fuzzy qualifying clauses. Syphilis in Northern Russia, the Baltic states and in Finland is “severe” and prevalent (1895, 11–12). In central Europe , it is “more or less common” but depends greatly on “social conditions,” “crowding” and the “number of military stations” (11). Cooper’s geography is comparative and relational, as he produces, although only vague, hierarchies of prevalence and severity. “The complaint is less frequent in Belgium than in France , and in France less virulent than in England ” (13). India and China are regarded as common spaces of syphilis transmission, with the latter hosting syphilis of “extreme severity” (13). In Japan, although “extremely common,” the disease is only “mild” (13). Although prevalent in Africa, it is exempt from the “central portion of [the] Southern” part of the continent (14); “[V]ery common” in South America, it is “said to be more common” in Mexico than anywhere else (14–15). “More,” “very,” “extremely,” “particularly,” “mild,” “severe” and “rare” are the qualifiers that should but do not give credence to Cooper’s geography. With the exception of Iceland, where the disease “has been introduced over and over again […] but has never made any progress and has never taken root” (11), Antilles, “the cradle of the disease,” where it is “particularly rare” (15), and among Native American tribes with little contact with the European settlers (14), syphilis seems to be everywhere.

Dependent on specific climatic conditions, Cooper argues, syphilis seems to be less severe in “southern and temperate climates” (1895, 16), but race, population density, sanitary conditions and preventive measures are further factors that decide on its prevalence and gravity (15). Ethnicity is entwined with geographical factors as is visible in Cooper’s assertion that syphilis “is said to be especially common among the Jews of Galicia” (1895, 12). With these criteria in mind, Cooper claims that despite earlier preventive measures such as the Contagious Diseases Acts , “England deservedly has the credit of preserving syphilis and pheasants better than any other country” (12). Although more detailed, Bulkley’s historical geography of syphilis indicates roughly the same spaces of syphilis occurrence and severity and is as relativist as Cooper’s , with such qualifiers as “considerable,” “relatively” or “greatest” (1894, 6) as the only indicators of the gradation in the disease incidence. He also cites the estimation that “in the United Kingdom there were at least a million and a half persons infected with syphilis during each year” (1894, 7–8). In view of their relativist nature, these attempts at delineating a (historical and current) geography of syphilis are questionable as cartographic practices aiming to offer a legible map of the disease’s incidence and severity. At the same time, however, they are a viable, although vague, means of underscoring its prevalence and indicating mobility as the chief factor behind its grand-s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Introduction
• 1. Structuring Syphilis
• 2. Novel Infections
• Backmatter