Syphilis in literature
Flaubert wrote about his syphilis in letters to friends, and Alphonse Daudet took notes on the deblilitating pain associated with his syphilis — notes that eventually became La Doulou, a small book that was published in 1930. (Doulou is the Provençal word for douleur or pain according to Julian Barnes, who translated La Doulou from the French and published it as In the Land of Pain in 2002.)
But syphilis also appears in numerous works of fiction.
Bertha Rochester (née Mason) in Jane Eyre appears to be suffering from the insanity associated with late stage syphilis, something Rochester seems to corroborate when he tells Jane that Bertha was "at once intemperate and unchaste."
And while I don't remember Candide well enough to say, Wikipedia says that syphilis appears there, as well as in Tale of Two Cities.
What I do remember clearly are references another writer makes to syphilis, or more accurately, to its late-stage insanity. The identity of the writer may surprise you: Willa Cather.
In Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915), Doctor Archie talks about another character who is institutionalized "with general paresis," or general paralysis of the insane — impairment of mental function caused by damage to the brain from untreated syphilis.
If someone reading The Song of the Lark doesn't make the link between syphilis and general paresis, the reference in the novel can slip by unnoticed. But general paresis was connected to syphilis as early as the 1850s, and the connection was widely accepted as medical truth when the French "syphilographer" Alfred Fournier endorsed it in the late nineteenth century. The cause of general paresis was finally confirmed in 1913 when doctors showed the existence of spirochetes in the brains of paretics.
Interestingly, the syphilitic character in Cather's novel is also a woman, and Cather makes a point of telling the reader the woman had multiple lovers. I don't find it surprising that Cather included any of these details in her novel. The Song of the Lark is groundbreaking in my eyes because it depicts a woman as a successful artist and a sexual being.
But that's a whole other topic.
Here is the Voltaire quote from Candide.
There is a famous piece of literary epidemiology in Voltaire’s ‘Candide’ tracing the trail of syphilis through a complicated network of intimate relationships.
Writing in the mid-1700s, Voltaire describes this scene: Speaking to the naïve young Candide is his old mentor, the ever-optimistic philosopher-tutor Dr. Pangloss, returned after many years, now in a much-diminished state, having lost his health, his wealth, and everything else, including an eye and an ear and most of his teeth. Candide inquires about his old idol’s dramatic transformation and gets this response:
“O my dear Candide, you must remember Pacquette, that pretty wench, who waited on our noble Baroness; in her arms I tasted the pleasures of Paradise, which produced these Hell torments with which you see me devoured. She was infected with an ailment, and perhaps has since died of it; she received this present of a learned Franciscan, who derived it from the fountainhead; he was indebted for it to an old countess, who had it of a captain of horse, who had it of a marchioness, who had it of a page, the page had it of a Jesuit, who, during his novitiate, had it in a direct line from one of the fellow adventurers of Christopher Columbus; for my part I shall give it to nobody, I am a dying man."
"O sage Pangloss," cried Candide, "what a strange genealogy is this! Is not the devil the root of it?"
"Not at all," replied the great man, "it was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease, which contaminates the source of generation, and frequently impedes propagation itself, and is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal . It is also to be observed, that, even to the present time, in this continent of ours, this malady, like our religious controversies, is peculiar to ourselves. The Turks, the Indians, the Persians, the Chinese, the Siamese, and the Japanese are entirely unacquainted with it; but there is a sufficing reason for them to know it in a few centuries. In the meantime, it is making prodigious havoc among us, especially in those armies composed of well disciplined hirelings, who determine the fate of nations; for we may safely affirm, that, when an army of thirty thousand men engages another equal in size, there are about twenty thousand infected with syphilis on each side."
"Very surprising, indeed," said Candide, "but you must get cured. Lord help me, how can I?" said Pangloss. "My dear friend, I have not a penny in the world; and you know one cannot be bled or have an enema without money."
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I just figured out how to use the "reply" button on my blog, and I hope you will forgive my tardy thank you for providing the quotation from Candide. I read it when I was in a college French class, and I think all of this was lost on me at the time. Glad to be older now, and to understand. Thanks for writing.
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