Venereal Diseases in Sixteenth-Century England

Abstract

THRmE SEEMS to have been a certain amount of despondency on the early history of syphilis in England.Several authorities have remarked what little record there is of venereal disease in the sixteenth century in England compared with continental Europe.Astrucl names only four British medical authors on venereal disease before 1600 compared with two hundred other European sources, and even then one is anonymous (1570), and another a Scotsman, Peter Lowe (1596), albeit his work was published in London.This leaves William Clowes and George Baker2 whose work will be discussed later.However, later in his work Astruc quotes the eighteenth- century London surgeon William Beckett, who included several other sixteenth- century English sources in his review (1718-1720)' of the early history of venereal disease in England, trying to prove the antiquity of syphilis.Of course at that time the separate pathologies of syphilis and gonorrhoea had not been formulated, these being considered part of the same disease.Even as late as 1891 Creighton4 in his History of Epidemics in Britain states that syphilis makes hardly 'any appearance in the English records of the time and no appearance at all in the writings of the English profession.'However not only have medical writers given us some record of the early history of syphilis, but a cornucopia of writings on venereal disease can be found in the daily records, court books (Emmison),5 and belletristic works of those times.Before I begin my survey I should make it clear that I regard the evidence for the American origin of syphilis and the first appearance in Europe with the return of

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