Project blog
Pox and Prejudice is a blog investigating the emotional history of the pox (syphilis) in eighteenth-century Britain. It asks how contemporaries reacted to victims of the disease, and how victims perceived themselves. These are questions that are addressed through an exploration of the texts in the University of Glasgow Library’s Special Collections, and particularly those in its exceptional Syphilis Collection. This amazing collection contains 242 texts published between 1496 and 1820, most of which were written by medical practitioners.
This project also looks at the skulls of syphilis victims collected by William Hunter and now housed in the collections of the Hunterian Museum. The Hunterian's anatomical collections are vast and varied, but why do they include the syphilis skulls? Were these simply objects used in medical teaching? Or were they also objects of fascination that evoked an emotional response in their viewers?
Categories used most frequently by the blogger:
medical history history of syphilis emotional history eighteenth century University of Glasgow
‘Direful Attendants’: The Great Pox and Shame
28 July 2017
‘The pestilent infection of filthy lust’ – William Clowes, A … treatise touching the cure of the disease called (morbus gallicus) (London, 1579)....
An unexpectedly fashionable career
11 June 2017
If asked today to list fashionable careers, it is highly unlikely that any of us would include ‘syphilis specialist’ in our list. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...
Medical Fascinations, Human Lives: Hunter’s Syphilis Specimens
12 March 2017
Should you visit The Hunterian Museum you can come face to face with victims of the great pox (syphilis). As you enter the main museum from the staircase, to the left hand side,...
‘Hypochondriacal People’: Lives Haunted by the Pox
15 August 2016
These dreadful Apprehensions have frequently possesst the Imaginations of some People that had taken the way to get the Pox, so, as to be soon perswaded they have it, whether it be...