Abstract
The introduction to Syphilis and Subjectivity frames the chapters that follow, both in terms of the longer history of the disease and current scholarship in which this volume intervenes. This collection aims to broaden the interdisciplinary scholarship on syphilis and the cultures of medicine by investigating how syphilis in particular has had a role in shaping modern subjectivity, exploring texts and contexts beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing in the present.
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Notes
- 1.
The “Jewish” nominative for syphilis was of course not confined to the early modern period but remerged as a central point of the medicalized racial propaganda of the Nazi regime.
- 2.
The first effective treatment against syphilis was the organoarsenical Arsphetamine (“Compound 606”) developed by Paul Ehrlich in 1909. This was followed by the advent of sulfa drugs such as Protonsil (sulfonamidochrysoidine) in 1932, which were effective on a broader range of gram-positive bacteria. On the history of antibiotics such as penicillin , see Podolsky (2015) and Bud (2007). On prior chemotherapeutic agents, such as Salvarsan and sulfas, see Lesch (2007).
- 3.
On modern syphilis, see most recently, Losse (2016), McGough (2010). See also Healy (2001), Arrizabalaga et al. (1997), and Merians (1997). For feminist readings of British and French histories of the disease in the eighteenth century, see Spongberg (1997). Broader histories include the work of Allen (2000) and Quétel (1992). In her recent Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture (2017), Monika Pietrzak-Franger broadens the scope of the discussion by addressing the unexplored tensions between the visibility and invisibility of the disease and thus addresses a variety of cultural and media practices that accompanied the evocation of syphilis in the Victorian era.
- 4.
We do not mean to suggest that antibiotic pharmacology was not also concerned with battlefield medicine and non-venereal disease acquired from combat and travel. Here, we are focusing on the hygienic and infectious disease aspects of military medicine.
- 5.
In Western culture, as early as the English Civil War, the prophylactic was used as a preventative tool in military medicine to mitigate the devastating effects of venereal disease of soldiers. Fahd Khan et al. (2013)
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Nixon, K., Servitje, L. (2018). Introduction. In: Nixon, K., Servitje, L. (eds) Syphilis and Subjectivity . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66367-8_1
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