Abstract
Until the twentieth century, much of what was known about syphilis and gonorrhoea was based on myth and superstition. Gonorrhoea had been known to exist for many centuries before Christ. It has been claimed that Moses was referring to gonorrhoea in the fifteenth chapter of Leviticus, when he laid down the law for the government of those who are affected with ‘a running issue out of the flesh’.1 Others have suggested that Herodotus, the Greek historian, was referring to gonorrhoea when describing the punishment inflicted by Venus on the Scythians. He reported that when the Scythians invaded Palestine, raiding the temple of Venus, ‘the angry goddess sent upon them and their posterity, the woman’s disease, which is characterized by a running from the penis’.2 The first detailed account of the disease was given by Aretaeus, a Greek physician, in the first century AD. He described the discharge as unfruitful semen that continued for days and nights.3 Hippocrates in De Locis Affectis mentions this disease and suggests that the principal cause of the illness was ‘excessive indulgence in the pleasures of Venus’.
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1 The Sick Rose
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67. Mr Eagle, ‘Production of Gonorrhoea and Chancre from Leucorrhoea’, The Lancet, Vol. 2 (1836), p. 491.
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© 1997 Mary Spongberg
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Spongberg, M. (1997). The Sick Rose. In: Feminizing Venereal Disease. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375130_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375130_2
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