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"Syphilis History."
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Syphilis and subjectivity : from the Victorians to the present
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.
Book
Examining Tuskegee
The forty-year \"Tuskegee\" Syphilis Study has becometheAmerican metaphor for medical racism, government malfeasance, and physician arrogance. The subject of histories, films, rumors, and political slogans, it received an official federal apology from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony.Susan M. Reverby offers a comprehensive analysis of the notorious study of untreated syphilis, which took place in and around Tuskegee, Alabama, from the 1930s through the 1970s. The study involved hundreds of African American men, most of whom were told by doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service that they were being treated, not just watched, for their late-stage syphilis. Reverby examines the study and its aftermath from multiple perspectives to explain what happened and why the study has such power in our collective memory. She follows the study's repercussions in facts and fictions.Reverby highlights the many uncertainties that dogged the study during its four decades and explores the newly available medical records. She uncovers the different ways it was understood by the men, their families, and health care professionals, ultimately revising conventional wisdom on the study.Writing with rigor and clarity, Reverby illuminates the events and aftermath of the study and sheds light on the complex knot of trust, betrayal, and belief that keeps this study alive in our cultural and political lives.
eBook
Infection of the Innocents
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries congenital syphilis was a major cause of infant mortality in France but mercury, the preferred treatment for the disease, could not be safely given to infants. In the 1780s the Vaugirard hospital in Paris began to treat affected infants by giving mercury to wet nurses, who transmitted it to infants through their milk. Despite the highly contagious nature of syphilis and the dangerous side-effects of mercury, the practice of using healthy wet nurses to treat syphilitic infants spread throughout France and continued into the nineteenth century.
eBook
Redefining the treponemal history through pre-Columbian genomes from Brazil
The origins of treponemal diseases have long remained unknown, especially considering the sudden onset of the first syphilis epidemic in the late 15th century in Europe and its hypothesized arrival from the Americas with Columbus’ expeditions
1
,
2
. Recently, ancient DNA evidence has revealed various treponemal infections circulating in early modern Europe and colonial-era Mexico
3
–
6
. However, there has been to our knowledge no genomic evidence of treponematosis recovered from either the Americas or the Old World that can be reliably dated to the time before the first trans-Atlantic contacts. Here, we present treponemal genomes from nearly 2,000-year-old human remains from Brazil. We reconstruct four ancient genomes of a prehistoric treponemal pathogen, most closely related to the bejel-causing agent
Treponema pallidum
endemicum
. Contradicting the modern day geographical niche of bejel in the arid regions of the world, the results call into question the previous palaeopathological characterization of treponeme subspecies and showcase their adaptive potential. A high-coverage genome is used to improve molecular clock date estimations, placing the divergence of modern
T. pallidum
subspecies firmly in pre-Columbian times. Overall, our study demonstrates the opportunities within archaeogenetics to uncover key events in pathogen evolution and emergence, paving the way to new hypotheses on the origin and spread of treponematoses.
Reconstruction of four
Treponema pallidum
genomes associated with human remains from around 2,000 years ago suggests that
T. pallidum
existed in the Americas and diverged to its modern subspecies before the fifteenth century European contact with the Americas.
Journal Article
Whole-Genome Analysis of Treponema pallidum Subspecies endemicum among Men Who Have Sex with Men, Japan, 2020-2023
Whole-genome sequencing of Treponema pallidum subsp. endemicum strains from men who have sex with men in Japan revealed a genetically distinct lineage from other geographic regions circulating via sexual transmission. Strengthening global molecular epidemiologic surveillance is essential for clarifying epidemiologic trends, clinical characteristics, and transmission pathways of this subspecies.
Journal Article
Photograph as Skin, Skin as Wax: Indexicality and the Visualisation of Syphilis in Fin-de-Siècle France The William Bynum Prize Essay
In early twentieth-century France, syphilis and its controversial status as a hereditary disease reigned as a chief concern for physicians and public health officials. As syphilis primarily presented visually on the surface of the skin, its study fell within the realms of both dermatologists and venereologists, who relied heavily on visual evidence in their detection, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. Thus, in educational textbooks, atlases, and medical models, accurately reproducing the visible signposts of syphilis – the colour, texture, and patterns of primary chancres or secondary rashes – was of preeminent importance. Photography, with its potential claims to mechanical objectivity, would seem to provide the logical tool for such representations. Yet photography’s relationship to syphilographie warrants further unpacking. Despite the rise of a desire for mechanical objectivity charted in the late nineteenth century, artist-produced, three-dimensional, wax-cast moulages coexisted with photographs as significant educational tools for dermatologists; at times, these models were further mediated through photographic reproduction in texts. Additionally, the rise of phototherapy complicated this relationship by fostering the clinical equation of the light-sensitive photographic plate with the patient’s skin, which became the photographic record of disease and successful treatment. This paper explores these complexities to delineate a more nuanced understanding of objectivity vis-à-vis photography and syphilis. Rather than a desire to produce an unbiased image, fin-de-siècle dermatologists marshalled the photographic to exploit the verbal and visual rhetoric of objectivity, authority, and persuasion inextricably linked to culturally constructed understandings of the photograph. This rhetoric was often couched in the Peircean concept of indexicality, which physicians formulated through the language of witness, testimony, and direct connection.
Journal Article
The Centenary Series - STIs Through the Ages: The dawn of the syphilis pandemic in the Old World: history and geography of syphilis in the early sixteenth century
ObjectiveTo describe the first wave of the syphilis pandemic in the Old World.MethodsSummary and discussion of early and recent literary and documentary data describing the spread of syphilis in Europe at the end of the fifteenth and during the first decades of the sixteenth century.ResultsFrom the second half of 1493, the spread of a disease that was clearly perceived as being sexually transmitted was the cause of considerable scandal and so much concern as to force Emperor Maximilian I to proclaim that it was the punishment for the sins of the affected as early as August 1495. Considered as new and unprecedented by most contemporaries and appearing just after the return of Columbus’ first expedition, a heated controversy concerning the origin of the disease began almost immediately and, despite the findings of phylogenetic studies of Treponema sequences taken from modern specimens and early remains, still continues today. Called by many often nationalistic names (particularly French morbus or Neapolitan disease), syphilis affected millions of people in the early sixteenth century, limiting their reproductive capacity and life expectancy, and greatly reducing their quality of life.ConclusionsRegardless of its geographical and temporal origins, the characteristics of this true pandemic were typical of those induced by a new pathogen in a virgin population.
Journal Article
Ancient genomes reveal a deep history of Treponema pallidum in the Americas
Human treponemal infections are caused by a family of closely related
Treponema pallidum
that give rise to the diseases yaws, bejel, pinta and, most notably, syphilis
1
. Debates on a common origin for these pathogens and the history of syphilis itself have weighed evidence for the ‘Columbian hypothesis’
2
, which argues for an American origin, against that for the ‘pre-Columbian hypothesis’
3
, which argues for the presence of the disease in Eurasia in the Medieval period and possibly earlier. Although molecular data has provided a genetic basis for distinction of the typed subspecies
4
, deep evolution of the complex has remained unresolved owing to limitations in the conclusions that can be drawn from the sparse palaeogenomic data that are currently available. Here we explore this evolutionary history through analyses of five pre- and peri-contact ancient treponemal genomes from the Americas that represent ancient relatives of the
T. pallidum
subsp.
pallidum
(syphilis),
T. pallidum
subsp.
pertenue
(yaws) and
T. pallidum
subsp.
endemicum
(bejel) lineages. Our data indicate unexplored diversity and an emergence of
T. pallidum
that post-dates human occupation in the Americas. Together, these results support an American origin for all
T. pallidum
characterized at the genomic level, both modern and ancient.
Analyses of five treponemal genomes representing ancient relatives of
Treponema pallidum
suggest that this pathogen originated in the Americas.
Journal Article
Historic Treponema pallidum genomes from Colonial Mexico retrieved from archaeological remains
Treponema pallidum infections occur worldwide causing, among other diseases, syphilis and yaws. In particular sexually transmitted syphilis is regarded as a re-emerging infectious disease with millions of new infections annually. Here we present three historic T. pallidum genomes (two from T. pallidum ssp. pallidum and one from T. pallidum ssp. pertenue) that have been reconstructed from skeletons recovered from the Convent of Santa Isabel in Mexico City, operational between the 17th and 19th century. Our analyses indicate that different T. pallidum subspecies caused similar diagnostic presentations that are normally associated with syphilis in infants, and potential evidence of a congenital infection of T. pallidum ssp. pertenue, the causative agent of yaws. This first reconstruction of T. pallidum genomes from archaeological material opens the possibility of studying its evolutionary history at a resolution previously assumed to be out of reach.
Journal Article
Syphilis and Social Upheaval in China
Syphilis was nearly eliminated from China 50 years ago but is now the most commonly reported communicable disease in Shanghai. Dr. Joseph Tucker and colleagues write that the Chinese syphilis epidemic holds important lessons about social and environmental influences on sexual health.
Syphilis, a sexually transmitted infection (STI) that was nearly eliminated from China 50 years ago,
1
is now the most commonly reported communicable disease in Shanghai, China's largest city.
2
No other country has seen such a precipitous increase in reported syphilis cases in the penicillin era. In 2008, an average of more than 1 baby per hour was born with congenital syphilis in China, for a total of 9480 cases; the rate had increased by a factor of 12 during the previous 5 years (see graph). A disease with social roots, syphilis has become a major scourge lurking in the shadows . . .
Journal Article