Chapter VIII

THE FRENCH POX.

One great epidemic disease of the first Tudor reigns, which brought consternation and distress to multitudes, makes hardly any appearance in the English records of the time, and no appearance at all in the writings of the English profession. Long after, in 1576, William Clowes, surgeon to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, first broke the professional silence about lues venerea in England, and in his larger work of 1579 he gave a number of startling facts and figures of its then prevalence in London. But the great epidemic outburst of that disease in Europe began in the last years of the 15th century; its ravages on the epidemic scale are supposed to have lasted for twenty or thirty years from 1494; and its subsequent prevalence is assumed, not without reason, to have been of a milder type and within narrower limits. We hear of it, in England, from the political side, at the time when popular arguments were wanted against the Romish mass-priests and against the monasteries and the orders of friars. In the practical reasoning of Englishmen the scandalous lives of priests, monks and friars made the strongest argument for the policy which the king had adopted towards Rome; and it so happened in those very years that a scandalous life was betrayed, and made odious in more than sentiment, by bearing an outward and visible sign. The epidemic of morbus Gallicus arose at an unfortunate time for the pretensions of Rome, or, perhaps, it was itself part of the march of events. In Simon Fish’s Supplication of Beggars, which was compiled in 1524 and was read to Henry VIII. shortly after, the weightiest plea is the charge of scandalous conduct resting upon the priests. In the inquisitions which preceded the suppression of the monasteries, the same plea is, justly or unjustly, brought to the front in the case of one abbey after another. So close did the association of a scandalous vice and its attendant disease become with the priesthood that James I., writing long after concerning the sentiments of his mother, Mary the queen of Scots, represents her as forbidding the archbishop “to use the spittle” in his own baptism, for the reason that she would not have “a pokie priest to spet in her child’s mouth.” These, says king James, were “her owne very words;” at all events, “a pocky priest” may be accepted as a phrase of the time. The fact that the epidemic of syphilis in England was used to discredit Romish priests is one of the few indications that we have of its existence in this country. Wide and deep as the commotion must have been which it caused, it found hardly any more permanent expression than the private talk of the men of those days. It was otherwise on the Continent. There, indeed, a copious literature sprang up, of which some thirty works remain, from the essay of Conrad Schellig of Heidelberg, printed without date or place, but ascribed to the year 1494 or 1495, down to the elaborate survey of the disease by Nicolas Massa of Venice in 1532. The single work extant in England from that, the earliest and greatest, period of the disease, is a poor piece of manuscript in the Sloane collection, translated from some foreign author, and entitled, “The tretese of the pokkis: and the cure by the nobull counsell of parris.” One of its cases is that of a man, aged forty, with two broad and deep, corroding and painful sores on his leg; another is of a bishop of Toledo, who had “pustules” and nocturnal pains “as if the bones would part from the flesh.” The vague meaning of the term pox is shown in one phrase, “paynes, viz. aches and pokkis.”

It was nothing unusual abroad to give cases, and to authenticate them with the names of the sufferers. Thus Peter Pinctor, physician to the pope Alexander Borgia, in a notorious but exceedingly scarce work published in 1500, enters fully into the truly piteous case of the cardinal bishop of Segovia, major-domo of the Vatican, “qui hunc morbum patiebatur cum terribilibus et fortissimis doloribus, qui die ac nocte, praecipue in lecto, quiescere nec dormire poterat,” as well as into the case of Peter Borgia, the pope’s nephew, “in quo virulentia materiae pustularum capitis corrosionem in pellicaneo [pericranio] et in craneo capitis sui manifeste fecit.”

Contrasted with the copious writing and recording of cases abroad, the English silence is remarkable. The origin of our first printed book on the subject is characteristic. A literary hack of the time, one Paynel, a canon of Merton Abbey, had translated, among other things, the Regimen Salernitanum, a popular guide to health several hundred years old. Going one day into the city to see the printer about a new edition, he was asked by the latter to translate the essay on the cure of the French pox by means of guaiacum (or the West-Indian wood) “written by that great clerke of Almayne, Ulrich Hütten, knyght.” For, said the printer, “almost into every part of this realme this most foul and peynfull disease is crept, and many soore infected therewith.” Ulrich von Hütten’s personal experience of the guaiacum cure was accordingly translated from the Latin, in 1533, and proved a good venture for the printer, several editions having been called for. The translation has no notes, and throws no light on English experience. It is not until 1579, when Clowes published his essay on the morbus Gallicus, that we obtain any light from the faculty upon the prevalence of the malady in England. Meanwhile it remains for us to collect what scraps of evidence may exist, in one place or another, of this country’s share in the original epidemic invasion during the last years of the 15th century.