The word rover came up for me again — this time in one of the many books I'm reading about the history of syphilis.

In "The Cruel Madness of Love": Sex, Syphilis and Psychiatry in Scotland, 1880-1930 , Gayle Davis writes about how general paralysis of the insane (GPI) was treated in Scotland before penicillin was discovered to be a cure.

In the 1800s, doctors were still reluctant to state that this kind of insanity was the direct result of syphilis — they believed that it could have other causes, at least for some patients.

One of the most interesting points the book makes has to do with the role social class seems to have played in diagnosis. If patients were "steady" and  "respectable," doctors seem to have found that GPI developed as a result of worry and stress, or some kind of actual brain injury (pg. 222). If someone had lived "a fast life" however, doctors were more likely to find that their insanity resulted at least in part from syphilis (pg. 224).

Most of the patient information Davis cites is about men, but there is information about women, too — and surprisingly, that's where the word "rover" comes in. A 42-year-old servant who came to the Rosslynlee asylum in 1891 was described in notes as "'[h]appy go lucky — a rover — fond of men.'"

I guess I'm just curious to know how often the word was used to describe women.

"The cruel madness of love" is a phrase from Tennyson's poem "Maud," and Davis uses these two lines as her epigraph:

    And most of all would I flee from the cruel madness of love,
    The honey of poison-flowers and all the measureless ill