The Tudor Scandals Of Sex And Syphilis | Absolute History

that carried a terrible stigma if you had the syphilis scars then you were seen as a sinner you were seen as a prostitute you were branded a syphilitic whore people are as promised curious in the past as they are today it's certainly socially frowned upon and all the printed literature and all the religious literature and all the morality says you shouldn't do it but people still do it you've only got to look at the court cases and the legitimacy records and the bastardy bonds to see how many illegitimate children are being born as a result of unmarried sex children weren't the only consequences of such activities in 1497 a disease was recorded in the British Isles for the first time and it's routine seemed to be via the most intimate of Acts in the most private place in the home the bedroom hospitals were being deluge with people suffering from a disease they'd never seen before William clothes the doctor in London noted that every other patient at his hospital had the same symptoms in the hospital of st. Bartholomew London among every 20 disease persons that were taken in ten of them had the pox William clothes produced a medical treatise describing the symptoms of the disease see he talks about it producing pains or aches ulcers nodes and foul scabs with corruption of the bones then he goes on here talks about venomous pustules scabs upon the forehead brows face and beard as about the secret parts it's cause he says was that it was a pestilent infection of filthy lust a sickness very listen odious troublesome and dangerous a notable testimony of the just wrath of God we now know that in fact these horrific symptoms were caused by a virulent bacterial infection which we call syphilis while they may not have understood its bacterial origin the Tudors knew enough to link its progress to sex the symptoms are very manifest and to a society that's obsessed with signs and symptoms it's very clear to them how this has come about the first stage gives the characteristic boils and marks on their sexual organs so it's seen as a result of sin of promiscuity many tudor towns had their bawdy house or brothel and these certainly aided the spread of the disease [Music] errant husbands carried the infection right back into the heart of the home as a poem of the time warms a woman that to a whoremonger is wed is in a most desperate case she scarce dares perform her duty in bed with one of conditions so base for sometimes he's bitten with turnbull street fleas the pox or some other infectious disease whatever the source of infection the association with illicit sex meant a sufferer was certain to become a social outcast they carried a terrible stigma if you had syphilis cos then you were seen as a sinner you were seen as a prostitute you were branded a syphilitic whore consequently the telltale signs of syphilis was sometimes cleverly disguised it was a real stigma to have damage to your nose because people knew immediately that you must have late stages of syphilis and so they even made wooden and metal false noses so that people could try and cover up the damage that syphilis had done here in the Museum of London's bio archaeology department there's further evidence of the impact of the disease on the city's population some of the treaties I've looked at from the 16th century talked about things like ulcers in the head and on the corners of the mouth and things like that do you ever come across something like that yeah we do we have an individual here that we can see from their skull that they are actually showing these lesions that were that we would identify as being associated with the venereal syphilis you can see here that's incredibly destructive and if you imagine this poor soul being alive and there's so much of it eaten away it's horrific it must have been absolutely horrendous because you've got those changes that we can then see obviously now in the dry bone but then you would have had that changes that would then be expressed in the soft tissues in the skin as saws we might see the infection affecting your eye which then can lead to blindness or also ventur'd around area and then you can destroy the soft tissues of that part of your face as well the burns show how sufferers could have lived with syphilis for decades the bacteria slowly eating away different parts of the body and with so many victims a lot of effort went into finding a remedy the problem was all too often the so-called cures could also finish you off this little volume by clothes is full of all sorts of remedies for dealing with syphilis page after page suggests different cures which indicates some water than none of them worked and after 40 or 50 pages of these various cures cleanse identifies one more he says this is for the curation of the disease called the French pox and it's called Quicksilver that is mercury mercury had long been thought of as a useful treatment for skin conditions because it seemed to have a beneficial effect from around the 1300s it had been used to treat skin complaints so whether it was psoriasis or leprosy or any other sort of infection they would put mercury on it and so when they saw that people with syphilis were developing skin lesions they thought they would use the usual treatment for skin lesions which was mercury mercury can be administered in all manner of different ways a man's penis can be injected with mercury there is a sort of what you might think of as a bit of a adulterated Underpants which have been dipped in mercury you can put those on and that'll do it it may have had an effect locally on the area that was being treated but of course we know that the initial Shanker the first sign of syphilis would actually heal up and go on its own anyway within several weeks and so perhaps after several weeks of mercury treatment if the skin lesion had gone they would assume it was because of the mercury rather than the natural course of the disease some of the ways tutor doctors applied mercury to the body were ingenious I took one of the more complex recipes to a specialist laboratory to analyze its makeup Baxters cream was a blend of lard beeswax various herbs and elemental mercury we mix it together and surprisingly it actually formed a nice even suspension we expected to see globules of Elemental mercury but in fact it ended have been a nice silver cream which is shown here Wow in the final concentration contains 35% of Elemental mercury 35% yes so shoes concentrations why didn't they just put mercury straight onto the skin you couldn't apply elemental mercury to the scheme because it would just fall off so this was a method of putting mercury into a cream and then to actually put this on the skin to treat the lesions from the syphilis so this is actually very clever so they've made a way of making a cream so that actually mercury couldn't be absorbed into it and then rubbed into the skin yes and it also tells us that they are able to make a cream which could be applied to the skin to give the same concentration of pure elemental manake very per I knew what they were doing yes they did yeah it's been carefully they knew how to do that would it have had an impact well elemental mercury doesn't actually diffuse through the skin there quickly about 1% of this cream would go through the skin but the main hazards are actually due to the inhalation that's why we can't take the mercury cream out of a sealed container it's lethal when we measure the concentration of mercury vapor coming from the cream it's off the scale at a body temperature say of around 3040 seven degrees centigrade that would have released a gas phase concentration about 50 milligrams per meter cubed and the work room air limits that we can tolerate today is point zero two so that's over two and a half thousand times more concentrated wow that's extraordinary so even if you weren't afflicted being in the room administering the treatment would have been hazardous mercury typically affects the nervous system and so it can cause pins and needles numbness in the hands and it can affect all of the nerves you could start to lose your sense of balance and not be able to tell exactly where you are in relation to the world but then once it starts to affect the rest of the nervous system it can get to the brain and it can cause dementia memory loss convulsions and then even death so while judas showed great invention they were actually making the bedroom itself a deadly chemical trap filling it with poisonous vapors they reduce great doses of it so much so actually that that one daughter said that after examining the bone of someone who died of syphilis he could see Quicksilver quivering underneath it and amazingly even today historians can't agree on where syphilis came from there are a couple of theories one that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis back from the New World and that was the first time it had been introduced to Europe and that's why it suddenly appeared but another suggestion is that there was some mutation in the bacterium around that time it suddenly became much more virulent and destructive and caused this severe disease that suddenly appeared so nobody really knows there would be no effective cure for syphilis until centuries later with the advent of antibiotics to treat syphilis properly and all infection doctors first needed an accurate understanding of the body and the better theory of disease they needed equipment the first microscopes for example were developed in the last decade of the Tudor period [Music]

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Id: TivmAimR-NE

Length: 12min 11sec (731 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019