Romance and Revolution

Making Sense of National Socialism in an Unstable Society

     Post WWI Germany was a country in crisis. Floundering in a system of incompetent leadership, economic disaster, and social unrest, the German public was desperate for change. The Weimar era was composed of bumbling progressivism and uncomfortable changes that provoked only suspicion and distaste among the people it attempted to serve. What the Germans really wanted was not to blindly follow alien models to an unknown and unpromising future, but to recapture the brilliant prosperity of an age gone by, but still very fresh in their memories. By catering to the country’s needs and, above all, to its emotions, the Nazi Party offered the Germans a strength they could have faith in again. Attracted to the strong leaders and broad applicability of National Socialism, more and more Germans turned away from the ineffective democracy of the Weimar Republic in the hopes that the Nazi Party’s strength and vision would lead their shattered country back to glory.

     After the chaos of the Communist and Socialist uprisings of 1918-1919, the German constitution was reformed, and the country found itself under democratic rule for the first time. Proportional representation allowed for more small parties in parliament and broader representation of public interest, and Cabinet`s new responsibility to parliament called for greater government accountability. However, the new democratic system had difficulty functioning in the unstable country it was trying to rule.

     Political parties under Germany’s pre-World War I authoritarian regime were unfamiliar with the responsibilities of democratic government and the art of political compromise that came with it. The German public, lacking in political education, was unaccustomed to making the political decisions democracy now expected of them.[1] Scepticism and unease hovered over the Weimar as both politicians and civilians alike tried to make the best of the democracy for which they were ill-prepared.

     The newly formed Weimar Republic in 1919 was a country of crisis. Germany had been defeated in WWI, resulting in national humiliation. With its pride in tatters and its economy in ruin, Germany found itself facing yet another trial with the Treaty of Versailles. With WWI at an end, the world powers drafted a treaty in which Germany carried the sole responsibility for instigating the war. Germany had not been involved in the drafting of the Treaty, and most of the country held deep resentment for the harsh provisions that included the loss of economically valuable territories and near-complete military disarmament. Arguably, the harshest of these was the controversial Article 231, which forced Germany to pay immense reparations to the war’s victorious countries. [2] These demands threatened to cripple the already damaged and struggling German economy. The Treaty of Versailles had a severely negative effect on the Weimar’s attempts at stabilizing the country. In the eyes of the public, the Treaty was a “permanent economic, psychological, and political burden,”[3] and many blamed the Weimar Republic for their troubles for having accepted and signed the Treaty. Hitler himself saw the Republic as a primary cause of Germany’s misfortunes, and the problems produced by the Versailles Treaty are marked as dominant contributing factors to the later rise of the Nazi Party.[4]

     The Treaty of Versailles demanded that Germany pay reparations of enormous value. The required sums were so great and the German economy so poor that the demands were almost impossible to meet. Consequently, the Weimar plummeted into a downward spiral of catastrophic inflation with the 1923 German mark weighing in at one trillionth of its value pre-war value.[5]

     In January of 1923, French and Belgian forces took occupation of Ruhr, claiming that Germany was failing to meet their required reparation payments. The German economy almost collapsed entirely. German citizens were sickened by the policy of passive resistance and what they regarded as the Weimar’s weakness.

     This distressing environment and its many issues with poverty, riots, and unemployment opened the doors for movements from both the extreme right and left, as each took advantage of the country’s weakened state to push for their own power. Left-wing support increased as leftists prepared for a communist revolution. The era also witnessed a rise in right-wing radicalism, exemplified by Hitler’s Munich beer hall putsch on November 8, 1923, which, though it failed, helped carry Hitler to political fame on a national level.[6] Chancellor Stresemann was forced to declare a state of emergency in order to keep the peace.  

     The disastrous inflation of the 1920s was taking its toll on the German middle classes. Having lost the prosperity accumulated during the war, inflation was jeopardizing middle class status and turning many toward radical political solutions. Victims of unemployment joined leftist working-class movements, while members still clinging to their middle-class status turned to the conservative right.[7] The people believed that the state had to be strong in order to keep Germans from “being slaves to the Allies and [to] restore the nation’s prosperity, national sovereignty, and integrity.”[8] Germans from both sides of the political spectrum blamed the social and economic decline on the Weimar’s democracy. Each seeking alternatives to the parliamentary republic, they were willing to sacrifice the democratic regime for the prosperity they had lost. The National Socialist party gained support off these sentiments by promising economic and national rejuvenation.[9]

     Support of the Weimar Republic stemmed primarily from socialists, Catholics, and the minority middle class. The foundation of Weimar support was precarious, as the republic lost the support of sector after sector of German society.[10] Far left Germans felt threatened by the Weimar, which they viewed as a Middle Class capitalist state. Communists stirred unrest with their belief that the republican regime ought to be overthrown by revolution. Members of the political right associated the Weimar with defeat, shame, weakness, and betrayal of German values. To them, the Weimar Republic was not considered a legitimate government. To set the country back in order, rightists envisioned a return to aristocracy or to the strong authoritarian regimes to which they were accustomed. The old aristocracy was similarly embittered against the system, resenting their loss of privileges that came with the democratic regime. The middle class originally favoured the republic, which they saw as defending their markets from communist revolution. However, this support fell with the decline of the economy for which the middle and lower classes blamed the Weimar.

     Along with the lack of support from the general public, the parliamentary government had an equally poor relationship with its military. The government didn’t trust the army to protect it, and their fears were probably justified; after the republic had signed the Versailles Treaty, the army had considered overthrowing the government for a military dictatorship.[11] The army solidly preferred authoritarianism to the democratic Weimar state.

     One of the major flaws of the German republic was the ineffectiveness of the Weimar’s political party system. Proportional representation allowed many small parties to be elected to parliament. Ideally, the parties should have been developing broad, open platforms to attract large numbers of voters. However, they were instead very particular, exclusive organizations representing distinct sectors of society. Their programs had little appeal beyond those belonging to the specific group to which they catered. Instead of uniting the country’s people under one solid regime, the Weimar democracy only further strengthened pre-existing societal divisions.[12]

     It was almost impossible for parties to obtain a majority in the Reichstag, but the conflicting interests among the parties also made most coalition governments unthinkable. The Reichstag was inefficient and allowed for only slow, limited progress as the parliamentary situation made significant legislation very difficult to pass. Parties were unaccustomed to compromise, conflicts of interest were abundant, and party loyalty was very strict. Tensions often rose so high that parties came to view each other not just as opponents in parliament, but as political enemies.[13]

     Right-wing intellectuals played with all sorts of ideas as to the nature of Germany’s woes. While their theories tended to vary, they generally established an association with the Weimar and “cultural decadence.”[14] They called the situation of the Weimar Republic a cultural crisis, and embarked on a campaign to discredit it. They referred to democracy as an illusion. The government was not run by the people, they argued.  Instead, the people were victims of manipulation by the political parties and special interest groups behind the Reichstag.

     In place of the socially and culturally detrimental Weimar Republic, right-wing intellectuals promoted the concept of a conservative revolution in which the ineffective attempts at progressiveness were abandoned and traditional values and ideals could be politically implemented.[15] This system, which Mueller von den Bruck called a “Third Reich,” would be an alternative to both communism and capitalism. [16] This state would be authoritarian  and ruled by an elite.

     This revolution desired by conservatives was exactly what Adolf Hitler seemed prepared to deliver. The following excerpts from Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s published work Mein Kampf demonstrates the kind of anti-democratic discourse that would have appealed to opponents of the Weimar’s passive policies and slow-moving, divided structure:

“The nationalization of the great masses can never take place by way of half measures...but by a ruthless and fanatically one-sided orientation...[T]he driving force of the most important changes in the world has been...a fanaticism dominating them and in hysteria which drove them forward.”[17]

     When viewed in the context of Weimar Germany’s political frustration, it is not surprising that Germans were attracted to the presence and the politics of Adolf Hitler and his party of National Socialists. In a political atmosphere of stalemate and obstruction in the Reichstag, Hitler presented an admirable, authoritative figure who thrived on action and could lead Germany forward to a new age of prominence. Germany was through with democracy. “Rule will always be an affair of a minority,” writes Joseph Goebbels in his novel, Michael, “The people have only the choice to live under open dictatorship, or to die under the hypocritical democracy of cowards.”[18]

     Hitler gained public support by doing what leaders of other political parties in the Weimar failed to do. By stretching his policies into a comprehensive movement, Hitler was able to appeal to a broad range of classes and interests. His political territory extended into all sectors of society and provided an alternative for any and all opponents of the democratic Weimar.

     Nazis created many Gliederungen to “develop the movement into a microcosm of society” itself.[19] By creating organizations for youth and particular professions, and by linking themselves to existing associations, the Nazi Party introduced programs that alleviated the burdens of the people and gained influence with wider sections of the electorate. Inspired by the politician Karl Lueger, Hitler knew that a successful party had to gain mass appeal by finding a way to be simultaneously socialist and nationalistic.

     Hitler’s party played upon the needs and emotions of classes who felt alienated from society as a whole. Nazi economic and social anti-Semitism—a defining party characteristic—appealed to the insecurity of workers and the lower middle-class, who were struggling hard against the capitalism that seemed to be benefiting the Weimar Jewish community.[20] He also fed the fires of German Nationalism, providing a  group identity and sense of belonging to all individuals. No matter who they were or what had happened to them, “everyday Germans were part of a distinct [group], better than the others, destined to share in the historical greatness of a larger group.”[21]

     Nazism was a modernization of the New Romantic movement promoting 19^th century Volkish ideology, and it acquired its mass base after WWI.[22] Nazism ideology built itself around nostalgia for the glorious past life of pre-war crisis Germany. The Nazis took this elitist, nationalistic belief system and transformed it into a mass movement applicable to the German public. The anti-intellectualism of the ideology was suitable for mass consumption and propaganda, while the anti-Semitism appealed to the anti-capitalist fervour of the Weimar public.

     The Weimar Republic was built in an era characterized by failure, disappointed hopes, and seemingly unattainable dreams. The philosophy and political idealism of the Weimar’s people grew “increasingly utopian and unrealistic” the more they struggled. [23] Socially, culturally, economically, and politically, the German people could not satisfy themselves with the post-war democratic modernity of the Weimar Republic. Hitler’s National Socialism succeeded in the way it combined old-fashioned Volkish German nationalism with modern mass movement techniques and enhanced the public’s already strong sense of 19^th century nostalgia.[24] National Socialism emerged as a system promising action when the Reichstag stalled, authority where democracy was feeble, and cultural and economic rejuvenation where the old society was crumbling. Through the modernization of New Romantic Volkish ideology, Nazism refused to allow Germans to forget the greatness of their past, and convinced them that such greatness could be theirs again. If they could return to prominence and prosperity, Germany could erase the crisis of the Weimar years like a bad dream.

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[1] Joseph W.Bendersky, A Concise History of Nazi Germany, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2007), 5.

[2] Ibid, 9.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 1.

[5] Ibid, 10.

[6] Paxton, Robert O, Europe in the Twentieth Century (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2005), 244.

[7] Mosse, George L, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 238.

[8] Bendersky, 10.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 5.

[11] Ibid, 8.

[12] Ibid, 6.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 12.

[15] Ibid, 13.

[16] Mosse, 280.

[17] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, in “How Hitler Viewed the Masses,” Nazi Culture:   Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1966), 9.

[18] Joseph Goebbels, Michael, in “Michael: A German Fate,“ Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1966), 106.

[19] Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic (New York: Routledge, 2005), 106.

[20] Bendersky, 21.

[21] Ibid, 22.

[22] Mosse, 237.

[23] Ibid, 238.

[24] Ibid, 317.

"The Just Rewards of Unbridled Lust"

Syphilis in Early Modern Europe


     The late 15^th century introduced a period of momentous transition to European history. A stream of intellectual, religious, economic, and political developments set Europe on a course of turbulent change that left little time for social adjustment. It was into this climate of tension and social unease that syphilis spread across the continent as a new, devastating, and rapidly spreading plague. Syphilis, or the pox, shocked all who encountered it; sufferers were afflicted with nasty sores and pains, often resulting in a particularly gruesome death.[1] No record of a similar ailment could be found in any of the ancient philosophical texts, from which, in addition to medieval Christian theology, Renaissance scholars derived all their knowledge of ethics, medicine, and science.[2] Unequipped with the knowledge to understand, combat, or control the pox, early modern Europeans contended with their fear by projecting blame onto the marginalized groups of society over whom they could assert control and by utilizing a providential worldview to justify the ensuing devastation.[3]


     Though the exact origins of European syphilis are unclear to this day, the start of its spread through Europe is believed to have coincided with Columbus’ return from America in 1493.[4] The timing gave rise to a popular theory that Neapolitan men in Columbus’ crew contracted the strange disease from Native Americans and infected the prostitutes in their home city. French soldiers invading Italy, so the story goes, contracted the disease from Naples’ prostitutes. In this way, the early modern phenomena of international and trade and warfare facilitated the illness’ progress of infection across the continent.


     The religious and philosophical European worldview included a providential and moralistic  understanding of causation. In a society that placed God at the head of every action, it was natural to assume that God meted out rewards to His people in the form of favourable circumstances and punishments as misfortunes, such as poverty and disease. Symbolic, metaphorical reasoning turned a person’s exterior into a representation of their interior qualities; imperfections, such as the debilitation and blemishes that came with syphilis, were then interpreted as signs of immorality on the part of the sufferers.[5] Syphilitics must then, logically, have sinned a great deal to bring such a horribly gruesome affliction upon themselves, and fear of the disease caused a significant degree of social tension. A mere accusation of infection could provoke lawsuits or terminate marriage engagements; contraction was synonymous with public shame.[6]


     With the concept of health linked to personal integrity, groups began to associate syphilis with those whom they disliked. Increasingly powerful nation-states found the popular abhorrence of syphilis to be an effective propaganda tool, naming rival nations as the origins of the disease. This gave political leaders grounds to criticize the habits and practices of their neighbours and maintain a popular nationalistic sentiment among their own people with regards to their nation’s purity. For example, a widely-used term for syphilis was the French Disease; this had the effect of not only blaming the French for causing the illness, but also of pathologizing Frenchness itself, attributing negativity to everything from the speech patterns, dress and customs of France among a nation’s own citizens. [7]


     While uneasiness over what was foreign was now inextricably linked with anxiety over the pox, the appearance of syphilitic sores on the genitals allowed Europeans to additionally link its spread to sexuality, though the mechanics of transmission remained unclear. Jacques de Béthencourt, a French physician practicing in 1527, believed that the illness was generated by the passions aroused during immoral sexual behaviour. [8] Though sexuality applies to both men and women, it was women who received the majority of the blame, both for the pox’s origin and for its spread. Europe’s steadfastly patriarchal structure made it easy for women, with their “natural” inferiority, to be incriminated for society’s social ills.


     Greek medical philosophy had established femininity in the European mindset as abnormal and somehow inherently diseased. The Galenic humoural model of male and female anatomy exacerbated the sexual double standard. It was believed that qualities of the uterus, coupled with the dark, “cavernous” nature of the female interior, encouraged the corruption of vapours generating syphilitic infection.[9] Additionally, men’s hot complexion caused them to suffer from the disease more than women. Women, however, were cold, dry and dense, making them less susceptible to damage. In other words, a defenseless man could fall ill by a single sexual encounter with an infected woman, but a woman could only catch syphilis through repeated intercourse with an infected man, automatically branding female syphilitics with promiscuity.[10] An Italian theory claimed that the pox could lie dormant in women without displaying symptoms, and the disease would only become “activated” when exposed to heat during sex; thus no woman, chaste or otherwise, was exempt from suspicion.[11]


     The view of promiscuous women as the primary source of the disease brought tremendous persecution onto Europe’s prostitutes. Prostitution, by no means a respectable profession, was not particularly shameful for women during the 15^th century. The occupation served as a profitable refuge for women with little other means of subsistence, such as orphans, the homeless, and victims of rape and domestic abuse. The era held a relatively free attitude toward  male sexuality, and prostitution was actively endorsed by many Church and town authorities. St. Augustine declared prostitution a necessary evil and compared it to a sewer system; prostitutes, he said, were “full of shame and disgrace,” but by providing men’s vulnerable sexual impulses with a controlled outlet, the industry saved society from being “overturn[ed] with lust.”[12]


     This attitude changed with the shifting moral climate of the 1500’s.  Stricter familial and personal values being enforced by the Protestant and Counter-Reformations as well as the providential fear of sexual disease provoked a renewed aversion to sexual immorality. Prostitutes were punished harshly for spreading the pox, while the men who bought their services were pitied as victims. “L.S.,” the 17^th century author of the Prophylaktikon, advised Europeans to be patient with men, for it was the strength of passion that drove them to foolishness; on the other hand, prostitutes, he wrote, could provide a more productive service to society by hanging themselves.[13] Authorities in Scotland declared that all “loose women” would have their cheeks branded with hot irons. Many brothels were shut down with the prostitutes banished from the town.[14] The Counter-Reformation used the image of the repentant Mary Magdalene to urge “fallen women” away from prostitution and the uninfected public.[15] The Convertite in Venice was a convent specifically established for reformed syphilitic prostitutes who were cloistered after having been treated in the hospital for Incurables.


     Anxiety over the destructive nature of the female body increased to a point at which girls were being confined even before they became infected. Renaissance Italian culture valued beauty, but beauty was defined in terms of harmony and balance, with ideal beauty existing only in nature. Excessive feminine beauty upset this balance, and beautiful women were regarded as prone to infidelity and vice.[16] Following the example of the Convertite, Venice founded the Zitrelle, an institution with the mandate of cloistering the young girls with the highest risk of succumbing to prostitution; those admitted were required to be young (between the ages of 12-18), healthy, poor, and beautiful. While the Zitrelle’s aim was supposedly to protect these girls from sin and infection, they were equally intended to protect outsiders from them. Society equated attractive women with wicked temptresses and maintained that feminine beauty was powerful enough to rob men of their ability to control their actions.[17] The community responded to this agitation in conventional early modern fashion; the girls and their feared feminine sexuality was confined, with the intention that they would remain so until marriage.


     In this age of religious warfare, popular attitudes were growing increasingly puritanical. The first victims of the illness having been soldiers and prostitutes, both infamous for immoral lifestyles, confirmed the association held by many between pox and the sin of lust.[18] The interpretation of the pox as divine displeasure with human sexuality combined morality with medicine to an unprecedented degree.[19] Law enforcement authorities used the disease as a tool to police sodomy, that is, criminal sexual behaviour. A diagnosis of syphilis was used as legal grounds for criminal investigation; agents searched for sodomites by interrogating patients in pox hospitals.[20]


     Medical responses to the pox threw scholars into what Kevin Siena has called “an intellectual scramble.”[21] Early modern conceptions of medicine proved problematic with regards to venereal disease. Latin Galenism described sexual intercourse as a primary method of maintaining good health; one of the earliest reactions to syphilis was to encourage the infected to continue copulating – a counter-productive measure, to say the least. It was not long before Europeans made the connection between sexual activity and transmission, while also recognizing non-sexual means of contracting the disease, such as from a mother to baby in childbirth.


     When early treatments, such as prescribed sex and washing of the genitals, proved ineffectual against the pox, more extreme procedures rose in popularity. The first of two principle treatments was the use of mercury, which ancient Arabic writers recorded as a remedy for skin disorders. European physicians tested mercury’s effects on syphilitic sores and combined it with the Galenic concept of humoural balance. The patient was confined to a hot room for periods between five and thirty days so they might sweat out the corrupt matter in their bodies, while mercury was rubbed onto the patient’s body in the form of ointments. Instead of curing the patient of syphilis, this procedure had seriously damaging side effects.[22] While mercury possesses certain anti-bacterial qualities that may have helped the Arab’s immune systems fight off their ailments, it is also a deadly poison that would have been especially dangerous when entering the person’s respiratory tract during the sweating procedure. One physician went so far as to suggest that his patients ingest the liquid mercury mixed with hot chocolate, but he warned them that this treatment was risky – he worried that the chocolate might be too dangerous for his patients’ consumption.[23] Not only did mercury fail to cure patients of the pox, but mercurial overdose commonly resulted in the loosening and loss of teeth, uncontrollable shaking, paralysis, and sometimes death.[24]


     An alternative treatment gained popularity among those who rejected or feared mercury. Many Europeans supported a theory that the most effective remedies for an ailment would be found in the region of the ailment’s origin. Thus, physicians who believed the pox hailed from the New World turned to guaiac wood, a plant native to the Indies, for the cure. The guaiac treatment involved grinding the wood into a powder and boiling it in water. The syphilitic patient was then confined to a warm room, as in the mercury treatment, and was restricted to a diet consisting of the guaiac decoction, little other food, and laxatives.[25] While guaiac wood was not poisonous, it had no other effect on the patient other than to induce sweating. This procedure, which lasted roughly one month, took a debilitating toll on those who tried it.


     Despite the ineffectiveness of these processes at curing syphilis, physicians’ patients continued to repeat them; many of them believed that the greater their suffering, the more likely they were to be healed. Their attitude is more understandable when one considers that in the early modern period, it was not expected that an ordinary life would be free of pain.[26] The painful and detrimental effects of prescribed medical treatments were not even necessarily perceived as negative. If the illness was a punishment for bad behaviour, then it made sense that redemption would come at a price, and Christian doctrine dictated that suffering in the present allotted for future rewards.


     The progress towards formulating a person-to-person theory of disease transmission in early modern medicine created problems for those who continued to view the pox in providential terms, and treatment of syphilis was dramatically affected as a result.[27] Few denied that the disease was, as William Clowes called it, “the just wrath of God,” but it was also clear that not all sufferers could be morally condemned, as babies and faithful wives also fell victim to it.[28] Christian charities—the primary, if not the only, source of medical treatment for the poor—faced the dilemma of distinguishing between “the deserving and the undeserving poor,” the undeserving being those who brought the pox on themselves through licentious living, and the deserving being those who contracted it through “innocent” means, such as a wife infected by an unfaithful husband or a baby by its nurse’s milk.[29] Clowes’ book, De Morbo Gallico, illustrates the contradictory attitudes toward medicine and syphilis. The book expresses the importance of healing those who suffer, but also that certain people are “unfit to be cured.”[30]


     The moral implications of the disease’s sexual nature split physicians on how best to approach it. Was it more important for the physician to save his patient’s body or his soul?[31] Some applied a providential perspective to their treatments, believing that any remedies were gifts directly given from God and required penance and God’s grace to be effective. Others avoided  treating syphilitics out of fear for their own souls; if the pox was a punishment issued from God, then it would be a sin for them to interfere with God’s will. [32] Syphilis became “a social disease,” as sufferers were shunned, both for their supposed depravity as well as for the contagion they carried.[33]

     Commonly adopted by early modern physicians was the notion that they had a duty to personally punish those who had brought this illness on themselves for their sins.[34] Marie de Maupeou Fouquet, a 16^th-century author of a book of medical remedies, stressed that syphilitics were not to be comforted “with mild remedies,” but that caregivers should “increase their torments by meting out the rigorous penances they deserved.”[35] Many charitable hospitals refused to treat syphilitics within their walls, transferring their pox patients to confinement in other locations or barring their doors to them completely. Paris’ Hôtel-Dieu, already full to bursting without the influx of pox-patients, called itself a hospital that “receives, feeds, and tends all poor sufferers, wherever they come from, and whatever ailment they have, even plague victims – though not if they have the pox.”[36] Others mercifully distributed their charity to pox victims, but returning patients would not be allowed treatment a second time; if they insisted on reverting to their licentious habits, then they deserved to suffer the consequences.[37]

     Out of this attitude developed the practice of publicly whipping syphilitics. Not only did this function as “necessary” penance on the part of the recipient, but in this way, authorities were able to use the “lewd and incontinent” lives of the sufferers as moral examples for others to follow. The flogging of victims already suffering intense physical torment illustrates the early modern centrality of public shaming rituals to the enforcement of social conformity.[38]

     The degree of suffering endured by the first European syphilitics went far beyond their considerable physical torment. Because every aspect of early modern life, from science and medicine to law and order, was based in Christian morality and uncompromising social mores, victims of the dreaded pox had to contend with equally dreadful medical treatments if they were lucky and ostracism from supportive social networks, religious condemnation and legal persecution if they were not. The Renaissance values of beauty and spiritual and aesthetic purity left no place for victims of disease associated with ugliness, uncleanliness, and sin.[39] Instead of reaching out to their lowly neighbours their time of need, the European masses blamed and criminalized the victims of the pox for all of the fears and anxieties that their unpredictably changing society produced. As the modern world examines its own responses to venereal disease, it would do well to remember the unwarranted suffering endured by the first European syphilitics and to be mindful that punitive and judgemental measures are ultimately harmful and ineffective.

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[1] Irwin W. Sherman, Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World, (Washington: American Society for Microbiology Press, 2007), 84.

[2] Peter Lewis Allen, The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 42.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Sherman, 84.

[5] Kevin Siena, “Introduction,” Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kevin Siena, (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 7.

[6] Allen, 45.

[7] Siena, 16.

[8] John Parascandola, Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphilis in America, (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2008), 7.

[9] Laura J. McGough,“Quarantining Beauty: The French Disease in Early Modern Venice,” Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kevin Siena, (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 219.

[10] Parascandola, 8.

[11] McGough, 219.

[12] Allen, 46.

[13] Ibid, 50.

[14] Ibid, 42.

[15] McGough, 225.

[16] Ibid, 222.

[17] Parascandola, 11.

[18] Allen, 42.

[19] Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike, (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 73.

[20] Siena, 19.

[21] Ibid, 20.

[22] John Arrizabalaga, et. al, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 139-140.

[23] Allen, 54.

[24] Parascandola, 16.

[25] Ibid, 18.

[26] Allen, 59.

[27] Siena, 20.

[28] Allen, 42.

[29] Quétel, 65.

[30] Bruce Thomas Boehrer, “Early Modern Syphilis,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, No. 2, (Oct., 1990), 198.His

[31] Allen, 48.

[32] Boehrer, 202.

[33] Ibid, 201.

[34] Allen, 51.

[35] Ibid, 50.

[36] Quétel, 69.

[37] Siena, 280.

[38] Ibid, 277.

[39] Siena, 8.