'All with Precious Jewels Strow'd'

Let’s start with the title of Jonathan Swift’s 1723 poem “Pethox the Great.” A Greek general? A biomed startup? This being Swift, it’s an anagram of “the pox,” meaning syphilis. Even Swift’s close friend Patrick Delany, after noting the poem contains “many fine strokes of satire as any in Hogarth’s,” added, “I only wish, the subject had been less disagreeable, and the colouring in some places, less strong.” Addressing the disease directly, Swift writes: 

“Thy fair indulgent Mother crown’d

 Thy Head with sparkling Rubies round:

 Beneath thy decent Steps, the Road

 Is all with precious Jewels strow’d.”

 

The “sparkling Rubies” and “precious Jewels” are the sores known as chancres that eventually become, if untreated with antibiotics, ulcers anywhere on the body. For his satirical purposes, Swift is describing late-stage tertiary syphilis, though the disease has been called “the great imitator” because it can manifest itself with many symptoms that can initially resemble other diseases. I remember a boy in junior high showering after phys. ed. class. He had severe acne over much of his body, and another kid mocked him as having “syph.” Swift is graphic even in disguise:

 

“Proteus on you bestow’d the boon

To change your visage like the moon;

You sometimes half a face produce,

Keep t’other half for private use.”

 

In the tertiary stage, which can develop ten to thirty years after the initial infection, lesions called gummas develop and can result in severe disfigurement. In high-school health class, the teacher – a basketball coach, of course – passed around a World War II-era Army manual devoted to the subject, amply illustrated with grotesquely malformed faces and penises.   

 

Swift takes a swipe at the French, commonly assumed by the English in the eighteenth century, to have brought the disease to their country: “as the learn’d contend, / You from the neighbouring Gaul descend.” Thus, “French disease,” French pox,” “French-sick.” Or blame it on the Italians: “Or from Parthenope [ancient name for Naples) the proud, / Where numberless thy votaries crowd.” In Part III, Chap. 8 of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Gulliver visits Glubbdubdrib and observes:

 

“As every person called up made exactly the same appearance he had done in the world, it gave me melancholy reflections to observe how much the race of human kind was degenerated among us within these hundred years past; how the pox, under all its consequences and denominations had altered every lineament of an English countenance; shortened the size of bodies, unbraced the nerves, relaxed the sinews and muscles, introduced a sallow complexion, and rendered the flesh loose and rancid.”

 

There’s no convincing evidence that Swift suffered from any venereal disease, though he often returns to the theme in his work. In “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1734) he writes:

 

“With gentlest touch, she next explores

Her shankers, issues, running sores,

Effects of many a sad disaster;

And then to each applies a plaister.

But must, before she goes to bed,

Rub off the dawbs of white and red;

And smooth the furrows in her front

With greasy paper stuck upon’t.”

 

Swift refers to “parti patches,” adhesive patches applied to the face in the eighteenth century, even by members of the upper classes, to conceal sores.