IV

CLAP AND THE POX IN ENGLISH
LITERATURE

By SIR D'ARCY POWER, K.B.E., F.R.C.S., Honorary Librarian,
The Royal College of Surgeons of England

GENTLEMEN,-I make no apology for the title of this
paper. " Clap" and " the pox " are words of ancient lineage
and were in common use, even in polite society, until they
were replaced by gonorrhoea and syphilis.

Gonorrhoea was used in its etymological sense from
quite early times. It meant any genito-urinary discharge,
from pus due to an abscess in the kidney to a leucorrhcea.
Our early ancestors had not much trouble in naming the
venereal diseases from which some of them suffered
Syphilis was not yet introduced and they had only to
consider gonorrhoea and soft sores. " Chaudepisse " was the
name given for many years to inflammation caused by the
gonococcus, for it was well known to the upper classes
who spoke Norman French, whilst their English servants
called it the Brenning (burning). John Arderne, an Eng-
lish surgeon, writing about I376, devotes a chapter to the
treatment of an " Evil that is called chaudepisse" and
advises injections of lead lotion. He also tells in another
place of " brenning of the urine in the yard withinforth for
which oil of almonds put in with a syringe availeth much."
He describes, too, how " the yard of a man or the wicket
of a woman should be treated if they be brent with heat
and great swelling, sometimes with huge sorrow and
pricking and in other patients with fever and unrest."
He gives the case history of a patient with soft sores

ending in a sloughing phagedaena. " The man's yard
began to swell, after coit due," says Arderne, " to the
falling of his own sperm whereof he suffered great griev-
ousness of burning and acheing as men do that be so
hurt. He was told by a lady to apply a plaster of boiled
leeks and grease. This made him worse." John Arderne
was called in " and the next day put the patient on a

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table and with a razor cut away all the dead and stinking
flesh," applied quick-lime and the patient got well.
The words " chaudepisse " and " brenning " lingered on

into the seventeenth century. Shakespeare says in " King
Lear ": " No heretic burned but wenches' suitors."
Dromio, in the " Comedy of Errors " (iv. 3), concludes
that because " Courtesans appear to men like angels of
light and light is an effect of fire and fire will burn ergo
light wenches will burn. Come not near her."

Gonorrhoea was employed occasionally at this time in
its specific sense, but still with some confused memory of
its etymology. Andrew Boorde, in his " Breviary of
Health," writes in the i66th chapter (ed. I575) of the
Gomory passio with a side heading, " The Gomer passio."
" Gontorhea is the Greek word. In Latin it is named
Profluvio somnis. The barbarous worde is named
Gomerra passio, it is named so because Gomer and
Sodome did sinke for such lyke matter, but this matter
is not voluntary and they did it voluntarily." Boorde is
using the term, therefore, to mean masturbation and
nocturnal pollution. He recommends for treatment
camphor, and opium and henbane in conserve of roses as
medicine; lettuce, melon and purslane as diet. It is
clear, therefore, that Andrew Boorde attached no definite
significance to gonorrhoea as he used the word.

" Clap " replaced " chaudepisse " late in the sixteenth
century, and the earliest quotation given in the " New
English Dictionary" is dated i587. It is of obscure
origin, but was found to be convenient and soon came
into common use. Howell speaks of it in his letters
" Ho-Elianae " in i650, and Samuel Butler, thirteen years
later, says of Hudibras:

He had such plenty as sufficed
To make some think him circumcised.
And truly so he was perhaps
Not as a proselyte but for claps (i. 64).

And in another place, detailing the power of love, he
writes:

'Tis this that proudest Dame enamours
To spite the world and to disparage
Claps, issues, infancy and marriage (ii. 241).

There are many passing references to the clap in
English literature, but the condition was not thought

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CLAP AND THE POX IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

worthy of any lengthy consideration, for the disease was
looked upon as a trivial complaint incidental to youth,
and it was a common saying that

A clap in Spring
Is physic for a King.

Dr. John Rolleston, in a paper on the " Medical
Interest of Casanova's Memoirs," published in Janus for
the year I9I7, pointed out that between the ages of four-
teen and forty-one Casanova acknowledges to eleven
attacks of venereal disease, and that very likely he had
many more. Four of the recorded attacks were probably
gonorrhcea only, one of which was complicated by
orchitis; five were soft chancres; one was syphilis and
one' was possibly herpes preputialis.
The treatment of venereal disease was lucrative.

Ouacks treated the acute and uncomplicated cases;
surgeons dealt with the subsequent gleets and strictures,
making large incomes even in our own times from the
passing of catheters. The subsequent sterility must have
had an effect on the social history of the nation. Many
of the older and better class families died out as a result
of the indiscretion of boys who were said euphemistically
to be sowing their wild oats.

It Nas far otherwise with the pox, which, coming as a
new disease at the end of the sixteenth century, was
looked upon as a serious and deadly affection to be
treated and if possible cured. But the treatment was
often more deadly than the disease itself. A certain
amount of moral reprobation attached to it which, curi-
ously enough, does not seem to have been the case with
clap. It had therefore considerable difficulty in securing
a name. For many years it was disguised in England as
MHorbus Gallicus, or simply as Morbus, interchangeably
with Lues or Lues Venerea, but ordinary persons spoke of
it as "the pox," using the word just as the present
generation uses " bloody," a mere interjection or an
intensive adjective.
The Concordance shows that Shakespeare employs

the word " pox " nineteen times, but only twice formally.
In " Love's Labour's Lost," Rosaline, in a chaffing match,
says:

"0, that your face were not so full of O's!
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And Katherine replies:
" A pox of that jest " (v. ii. 46).

And again in " Pericles," where Pander, speaking of
Marina, says:

" Now the pox upon her green sickness for me!"

And the Bawd answers:
"Faith, there's no way to be rid of it but by the way of the pox"

(iv. X. I4).
The two diseases had become hopelessly confused with

each other in the minds of the public by i63I, and so
remained for more than 200 years. Philip Massinger, in
"The Emperor of the East," which was licensed on
March iith, 1631, makes the Empiric say (Act IV,
Scene 4) of a conjuring Balsam in which the Emperor had
faith:
"An excellent receipt, but does your Lordship know what 'tis good

for ?
PALEL: I would be instructed."
SURGEON: " For the gonorrhoea or, if you would hear it in plain

phrase, the Pox."
EMPIRIC: " If it cure his Lordship of that by the way, I hope, Sir,

'tis the better. My medicine serves for all things and the pox, Sir,
though falsely named the sciatica or gout, is the more catholic sick-
ness."

The Restoration dramatists made many of their
plots turn upon venereal disease. Wycherley, in " The
Country Wife," represents Horner as pretending to be
impotent from the pox and enables him thereby to seduce
the wives of his friends. Shadwell, in " The Humourist,"
assumes that the pox is a humour, not a disease. But I
need not dwell upon the plays of this period. They have
been considered recently and exhaustively by Dr. Herbert
Silvette, of the Medical School of the University of
Virginia (The Annals of Medical History, I937, Vol. 9,
New Series, pp. 37I-394). What strikes one in reading
them is the light-hearted manner in which the subject of
venereal disease is approached. It is taken as a matter
of course and implies no moral turpitude or social handi-
cap. It was widely spread and was looked upon as an
unlucky or foolish mischance. Mr. Pepys (September 2nd,
i66i) writes in his Diary: " Mr. Pickering though he be
a fool yet he keeps much company and will tell all he

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CLAP AND THE POX IN ENGLISH LITERATITRE

knows and hears. . . . He tells me plainly of the vices
of the Court and how the pox is so common there, and,
as I hear on all hands, that it is as common as eating and
drinking."
But we cannot afford to throw stones. The newspapers

at the present time are full of divorce news. It may be
that as we think there were few virtuous people in Stuart
days, so our successors may equally think that there
must have been few undivorced couples in this generation,
and that the marriage vows were more honoured in the
breach than in the observance by the majority of those
nowv living, which is manifestly untrue.

Dryden, in his bitter attack upon Shaftesbury and on
the dissenting and fanatical clergy of his day, says in
"The Medal," published in I682:

Religion thou hast none; thy mercury
Has past through every sect, or theirs through thee,
But what thou givest that venom still remains
And the poxed nation feels thee in their brains,
What else inspires the tongue and swells the breasts
Of all thy bellowing renegado priests.

Things began to mend at the beginning of the eigh-
teenth century. English writers took a more serious view
of venereal disease, pointing to the physical rather than
to the moral disabilities of the clap and pox, which by
this time had become identical in the mind of the public.
The Tatler ends an amusing paper on Artificial Noses,
written jointly by Addison and Steele and dated Decem-
ber 7th, I7Io (No. I60), with the advice:

" I shall close this Paper with an admonition to young
men of the Town which I think the more necessary
because I see several new fresh-coloured faces that have
made their first appearance in it this winter. I must
therefore assure them that the art of making noses is
entirely lost, and, in the next place, beg them not to
follow the example of our town-rakes who live as if there
were a Taliacotius to be met with at the corner of every
street. Whatever young men may think, the nose is a
very becoming part of the face; and a man makes a silly
figure without it. But it is the nature of youth not to
know the value of anything until they have lost it. The
general precept, therefore, I would leave with them is to
regard every town-woman as a particular kind of Syren
that has a design upon their noses, and that amidst her

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flatteries and allurements they will fancy she speaks to
them in that humourous phrase of Old Plautus, Ego tibi
faciem denasabo mordicus, ' Keep your face out of my
way, or I will bite off your nose.' "

Daniel Defoe took up the story a few years later,
applying it to women instead of men. He published in
I722 " The Fortunes of Moll Flanders," who was bom in
Newgate, was twelve years a whore, five times a wife,
twelve years a thief, and eight years a transported felon
in Virginia." She was a queen of rogues, but it is impos-
sible not to like her. She escaped both the clap and the
pox, grew rich, lived honestly, and died a penitent at
the age of sixty. Defoe takes occasion to point out the
danger of promiscuous intercourse when he makes Moll
Flanders say:

" There is nothing so absurd, so surfeiting, so ridi-
culous, as a man heated by wine in his head and a wicked
lust in his inclination together; he is in the possession
of two devils at once and can no more govern himself by
his reason than a mill can grind without water. Vice
tramples upon all that was in him that had any good in
it; nay, his very sense is blinded by its own rage and he
acts absurdities even in his own view, such as drinking
more when he is drunk already, picking up a common
woman without any regard to what she is or who she is;
whether sound or rotten, clean or unclean ; whether ugly
or handsome, old or young. Such a man is worse than a
lunatic.

" These are the men of whom Solomon says, 'They go
like an ox to the slaughter, till a dart strikes through their
liver'; an admirable description, by the way, of the foul
disease which is a poisonous deadly contagion mingling
with the blood whose centre or fountain is the liver;
from whence by the swift circulation of the whole mass
that dreadful nauseous plague strikes immediately
through his liver and his spirits are infected, his vitals
stabbed through as with a dart."

Defoe continues his homily and Moll says: "As for
me I would have sent him safe home to his house and to
his family, for 'twas ten to one but he had an honest
virtuous wife and tender innocent children that were
anxious for his safety and would have been glad to have
gotten him back home and taken care of him, till he was
restored to himself and then with what shame and regret

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CLAP AND THE POX IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

woiild he look back upon himself! How would he
reproach himself with associating himself with a whore!
picked up in the worst of all holes, the cloister [of the
Priory church during St. Bartholomew's Fair in Smith-
field], among the dirt and filth of the town! how would
he be trembling for fear he had got the pox, for fear a
dart had struck through his liver and hating himself
every time he looked back upon the madness and brutality
of his debauch! how would he, if he had any principles
of honour, abhor the thought of giving any ill-distemper,
if he had it, as for aught he knew he might, to his modest
and virtuous wife and thereby sowing the contagion in
the life-blood of his posterity."

Smollett published " Roderick Random " in I748, and
as an episode gives the history of Miss Williams (Chapters
XXI and XXII). He tells that when his hero first met the
lady " she found herself dangerously infected with a dis-
temper to which all women of the town are particularly
subject; that her malady gaining ground every day she
became loathsome to herself and offensive to others ; that
she had accordingly put herself into the hands of an
advertising doctor, who, having fleeced her of all the
money she had or could procure, left her in a worse con-
dition than that in which he had found her." Smollett,
too, points a moral to adorn this tale, but it is from the
harlot's point of view. He says:

" Of all professions I pronounce that of the courtesan
the most deplorable but, Miss Williams affirmed, that not-
withstanding the disgrace which had fallen to her share,
she had not been so unlucky in the condition of the prosti-
tute as many others of the same community. I have often
seen, said she, whilst I strolled about the streets at mid-
night, a number of naked wretches reduced to rags and
filth, huddled together like swine, in the corner of a dark
alley; some of whom, but eighteen months before, I had
known the favourites of the town, rolling in affluence and
glittering in all the pomp of equipage and dress. And
indeed the gradation is easily conceived; the most
fashionable woman of the town is as liable to contagion
as one in a much humbler sphere; she infects her
admirers; her situation is public; she is avoided,
neglected, unable to support her usual appearance, which,
however, she strives to maintain as long as possible; her
credit fails, she is obliged to retrench and become a night-

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walker; her malady gains ground; she tampers with her
constitution and ruins it; her complexion fades; she
grows nauseous to everybody; finds herself reduced to a
starving condition; is tempted to pick pockets; is
detected, committed to Newgate, where she remains in
a miserable condition till she is discharged. Nobody will
afford her lodging; the symptoms of her distemper have
grown outrageous; she sues to be admitted into an
hospital, where she is cured at the expense of her nose;
she is turned out naked into the streets, depends upon
the addresses of the lowest class, is feign to allay the rage
of hunger and cold with gin.; degenerates into a brutal
insensibility, rots and dies upon a dunghill."
Lord Chesterfield looks at the matter from the point of

view of a man of the world without regard to any moral
question. He writes a letter to his natural son, Philip
Stanhope, which is dated November 8th (O.S.), I750,
saying:

" You will easily perceive, that I mean to allow you
whatever is necessary not only for the figure but for the
pleasures of a gentleman and not to supply the profusion
of a rake. This you must confess does not savour of either
the severity or parcimony of old age. . . . Having men-
tioned the word Rake I must say a word or two more
upon that subject because young people too frequently,
and always fatally, are apt to mistake that character for
that of a man of pleasure; whereas there are not in the
world two characters more different. A rake is the com-
position of all the lowest, most ignoble, degrading, and
shameful vices ; they all conspire to degrade his character
and to ruin his fortune ; while wine and the pox contend
which shall soonest and most effectually ruin his consti-
tution. A dissolute flagitious footman or porter makes
full as good a rake as a man of the first quality. By the
bye, let me tell you, that in the wildest part of my youth,
I never was a rake, but on the contrary, always detested
and despised the character.

" A man of pleasure, though not always so scrupulous
as he should be, and, as one day he will wish to have been,
refines at least his pleasures by taste, accompanies them
with decency, and enjoys them with dignity. Few men
can be men of pleasure; every man may be a rake."

This, I think, is the end of venereal disease in litera-
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CLAP AND THE POX IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

ture for many years. A new school of novelists came in
with Fielding and Richardson. The lady novelists of the
half century following them very properly ignored the
subject; what the present generation writes about I do
not know, for I have not read them. I am, however, quite
sure that there is no allusion to venereal disease in the
writings of Jane Austen, Miss Burney, or the Brontes.
Clap and pox had become vulgar words and were replaced
by gonorrhoea and syphilis. The whole subject of
venereal disease had become tabu during the Victorian
period, and for many years there was a conspiracy of
silence. The disease was looked upon as a divine punish-
ment for sexual immorality, and it is not mentioned either
by Thackeray or Dickens.

Better counsels prevailed in our times. Ibsen wrote of
it in " Ghosts," published in i88i, and ten years later
Brieux in " Les Avaries," known to us as " Damaged
Goods." They called attention in all seriousness to the
disastrous effects of syphilis and thereby began to educate
the public upon right lines. But this dragging venereal
disease back into the light met with considerable opposi-
tion, and it was not until a still later period that its divine
origin was abandoned. The discovery of the gonococcus
and of the Sfirochate pallidum ended the myth once and
for all. The Government took the matter in hand in I9I4
and taught that prevention was better than cure. The
cost of treatment was subsidised, and the walls of the
public urinals are now placarded with directions about
" Clap and the Pox," so that the old words have come
back into common use. But these placards are in no
sense literature, and the subject of my address is Venereal
D.isease in English Literature.

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