Pox Britannica

Satan’s Harvest Home, an anonymous pamphlet published in London in 1749, offers a copious accounting of contemporary vices, with special attention to “the Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Pimping, Sodomy, And the Game at Flatts.” That state was strong, the pamphlet found, throughout “this good Protestant kingdom” and especially in the capital city of London: brothels bustling, coffeehouses, taverns, and gin shops overflowing, homosexuality on the rise, and the streets filled with a “vast Body of Courtezans, which stands ready, on small Purchase, to obey the Laws of Nature, and gratify the Lust of every drunken Rake-hell.” The unhappy results were, likewise, everywhere to be discerned: livelihoods, marriages, and reputations lost; illegitimate children gotten. Worst of all was “the Propagation of that infectious Disease call’d the French Pox, which in two Centuries has made such incredible Havock all over Europe.” Soldiers, university students, and dissolute aristocrats were notoriously prone to it—as, of course, was the vast body of courtesans—but no one was immune: “Men give it to their Wives; Women to their Husbands, or perhaps their Children; they t...