Venereal Disease on This Day in History

 

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This Day in History: The first venereal disease clinic opened at London Lock Hospital on this day in 1747. The London Lock Hospital was the first voluntary hospital for venereal disease. It was also the most famous and first of the Lock Hospitals which were developed for the treatment of syphilis. 

Many famous historical figures, including Franz Schubert, Arthur Schopenhauer, Édouard Manet, Charles Baudelaire, and Guy de Maupassant are believed to have had the disease. Friedrich Nietzsche was long believed to have gone mad as a result of tertiary syphilis.

Sexually transmitted diseases have been known to exist throughout ancient history.

Some believe that King David in the Bible had an STD based on his words at Psalm 38:

"My wounds are loathsome and corrupt, Because of my foolishness. I am pained and bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day long. For my loins are filled with burning; And there is no soundness in my flesh. I am faint and sore bruised: I have groaned by reason of the disquietness of my heart." ASV

Some also believe that Leviticus 15 also refers to a venereal disease:

"And Jehovah spake unto Moses and to Aaron, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When any man hath an issue out of his flesh, because of his issue he is unclean. And this shall be his uncleanness in his issue: whether his flesh run with his issue, or his flesh be stopped from his issue, it is his uncleanness." ASV

John Gill in his Exposition of the Bible wrote here: "what physicians call a 'gonorrhoea', and we, as in the margin of our Bibles, 'the running of the reins'".

Also, "In the Book of Numbers it is written that 12000 Israelites after the war with the Midianites returned with a 'gleet' and 24000 enslaved women. Moses, seeing their illness, ordered the slaughter of the women and a quarantine of 7 days for his soldiers; from the Bible we also know the patriarch Job had a strange skin disease, later believed to be syphilis, and that Solomon in the 'proverbs' advises men to avoid loose women, even though he had many wives and concubines." [History of Venereal Diseases from Antiquity to the Renaissance by Franjo Gruber1, Jasna Lipozencic, Tatjana Kehler]

That syphilis prevailed among the ancient Israelites is sufficiently apparent from the accounts of the lepra in Leviticus, a complaint which, from the graphic delineation given by Moses of its contagious nature, so closely corresponds in its main features with syphilis that they must be regarded as being one and the same malady. No impartial and enlightened physician can read the accounts of the sufferings of Job and of David, those two great and wonderful men, without being convinced that they were brought on by what are usually called 'early indiscretions.' The symptoms they so graphically describe clearly point to what is now known as the tertiary form of the disease. Job, in chapter vii. of the Book bearing his name, says: 'My flesh is covered with putrid sores,' and, in chapter xxx., he adds: 'My bones are pierced with pains in the night season, and my sinews take no rest.' The royal Psalmist says: 'There is no soundness in my flesh because of thine anger; there is no rest for my bones on account of my transgressions. My sores stink and are corrupt, because of my folly. For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease, so that there is no soundness in my flesh.' Psalm xxxviii. Gonorrhoea prevailed in the time of Moses, and men affected with it were pronounced as unclean, and, consequently, as unfit to cohabit with their wives. Is it probable that the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, both of which were destroyed on account of their wickedness, their crimes against nature, and other grave offences, were free from syphilis? Sexual commerce between the two sexes must bave been of constant occurrence, and been followed, as it is in our own day, by the saddest results. The earlier races of mankind were endowed with the same feelings and passions as the people of modern times, and that promiscuous sexual intercourse was common among them is proved by the fact that concubinage was one of the peculiar prerogatives of the higher and more wealthy classes." ~SD Gross, Address in Surgery, American Medical Association 1874