Olivia Weisser of University of Massachusetts Boston will give this year's Linda and Charles Wilson Humanities in Medicine Lecture on April 9 at 5:00 p.m. in the Great Plains Art Museum. The event is free and open to the public.
"The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London" will offer a history of London life from 1650-1750 from the point of view of a shameful sexually transmitted disease. A substantial number of Londoners contracted venereal disease, yet we know relatively little about what it was like to live with it. The talk recovers everyday experiences of disease by turning away from medical institutions and learned writing and toward streets, shops, and homes where ordinary patients and healers interacted.
In particular, it looks at how patients shopped for pox cures using addresses printed on over 700 advertisements. There was a substantial market for treating the pox that included healers peddling pills and potions alongside non-medical retailers like bakers and grocers who sold treatments secretly out of their shops—the leading edge of a vast proprietary drug trade over a century earlier than historians presumed.
Weisser's book The Dreaded Pox was published by Cambridge University Press. Her previous book, Ill Composed (Yale University Press, 2015) was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Award and short-listed for a British Medical Association Book Award. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Historical Association, and Huntington Library, among others.
Visit her faculty webpage to learn more.
