THE DREADED POX

A richly textured portrait of a city steeped in shame.

Weisser, a historian at the University of Massachusetts Boston, delivers a history lesson with a novelist’s eye for detail, resurrecting a London that is filthy, fearful, and alive with commerce and contagion. She begins, fittingly, with Samuel Pepys in 1664, fretting over his brother Tom, who is “deadly ill—and which is worse, that his disease is the pox.” Pepys calls in a second opinion, desperate to erase the stain, and persuades himself (and others) that the initial diagnosis was wrong. Weisser compares this quiet act of denial to the families of gay men in the 1980s and ’90s who altered obituaries to disguise AIDS-related deaths. The “pox,” she explains, was an elastic term encompassing many afflictions, mostly sexual, and all freighted with moral reproach. Londoners hid their shame behind wigs, face patches, and mercury-based ointments, while the city thrummed with peddlers and backstreet quacks hawking cures. At Bartholomew Fair, she conjures dancing monkeys, Venetian girls on rope, and prostitutes offering a good time—and a bad infection, scenes echoed in the bawdy ballads of the age. Remedies mixed mercury, sassafras, and jalap; some involved digesting quicksilver and turpentine. Edward Jewel’s “Incomparable Extractum Humorale” was sold in 23 shops across London, from grocers to cheesemongers—a forerunner of modern pharmaceutical branding. Each chapter opens with a vignette—a maid hiding pills under her bed, a wife using her infection as evidence in court of her husband’s infidelity—and together they trace the disease from street to sickroom to courtroom. The author draws heavily on John Marten’s A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease (1707), one of the few substantial sources available to her. “The pox was the first modern disease,” Weisser writes, “but not for the reasons we like to think.” Her argument—that shame, not science, shaped how people experienced illness—feels startlingly contemporary.

A lucid, humane book that shows how fear, commerce, and desire made London both sick and modern.