Among the glimpses of contemporary manners in Bullein’s Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence (1564), there is one referring to the pox; Roger, the groom, soliloquizes thus: “her first husband was prentice with James Elles, and of him learned to play at the short-knife and the horn thimble. But these dog-tricks will bring one to the poxe, the gallows, or to the devil[842].” Bullein, in his more systematic handbook to health, promises to treat of the pox fully, but omits to do so. In one place he refers to the wounds of a young man who fell into a deep coal-pit at Newcastle as having been healed “by an auncient practisour called Mighel, a Frencheman, whiche also is cunnynge to helpe his owne countrey disease that now is to commonly knowen here in England, the more to be lamented: But yet dayly increased, whereof I entinde to speake in the place of the Poxe.” But the only other reference is (in the section on the “Use of Sicke Men and Medicine,”) to certain drugs “which have vertue to cleanse scabbes, iche, pox. I saie the pox, as by experience we se there is no better remedy than sweatyng and the drinkyng of guaiacum,” etc[843].
A good instance of the oblique mode of reference to the malady occurs in another dialogue by a surgeon, Thomas Gale[844]. The pupil who is being instructed tables the subject of “the morbus,” which he farther speaks of as “a great scabbe;” whereupon Gale pointedly takes him to task for the affectation of “the morbus;” any disease, he says, is the morbus; what you mean is the morbus Gallicus.
About the same date, 1563, a casual reference is made to the wide prevalence of the pox by John Jones in his Dyall of Agues. In illustration of the fact that various countries originate different forms of pestilence, as the Egyptians the leprosy, the Attics the joint-ache, the Arabians swellings of the throat and flanks, and the English the sweating sickness, he instances farther, “the Neapolitans, or rather the besiegers of Naples, with the pockes, spread hence to far abroad through all the parts of Europe, no kingdom that I have been in free—the more pity[845].”
English Writings on the Pox in the 16th Century.
The first original English writer on the pox was William Clowes. In his treatise[846] of 1579, dedicated to the Society of the Barbers and Chirurgions, he says that he had been bold “three years since to offer unto you a very small and imperfect treatise of mine touching the cure of the disease called in Latine Morbus Gallicus, the which, forasmuch as it was at that time rather wrested from me by the importunitye of some of my frendes, upon certain occasions then moving, than willingly of my selfe published, it passed out of my handes so sodeinly and with so small overlooking or correction,” that he now in 1579 reissues it in a revised and corrected form.
“The Morbus Gallicus or Morbus Neapolitanus, but more properly Lues Venera, that is the pestilent infection of filthy lust, and termed for the most part in English the French Pocks, a sicknes very lothsome, odious, troublesome and daungerous, which spreadeth itself throughout all England and overfloweth as I thinke the whole world.” He then characterises the vice “that is the original cause of this infection, that breedeth it, that nurseth it, that disperseth it.” In the cure of the malady he has had some reasonable experience, and no small practice for many years. According to the following passage, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, to which Clowes was surgeon, was three parts occupied by patients suffering from this malady:—
“It is wonderfull to consider how huge multitudes there be of such as be infected with it, and that dayly increase, to the great daunger of the common wealth, and the stayne of the whole nation: the cause whereof I see none so great as the licentious and beastly disorder of a great number of rogues and vagabondes: The filthye lyfe of many lewd and idell persons, both men and women, about the citye of London, and the great number of lewd alehouses, which are the very nests and harbourers of such filthy creatures; By meanes of which disordered persons some other of better disposition are many tymes infected, and many more lyke to be, except there be some speedy remedy provided for the same. I may speake boldely, because I speake truely: and yet I speake it with very griefe of hart. In the Hospitall of Saint Bartholomew in London, there hath bene cured of this disease by me, and three (3) others, within this fyve yeares, to the number of one thousand and more. I speake nothing of Saint Thomas Hospital and other howses about this Citye, wherein an infinite multitude are dayly in cure.... For it hapneth in the house of Saint Bartholomew very seldome but that among every twentye diseased persons that are taken in, fiftene of them have the pocks.” Like the earlier writers on the Continent he recognizes that the disease is communicated in more ways than one; he speaks of “good poor people that be infected by unwary eating or drinking or keeping company with those lewd beasts, and which either for shame will not bewray it, or for lack of good chirurgions know not how to remedy it, or for lack of ability are not able otherwise to provide for the cure of it.”
In so far as Clowes follows his own experience, he is under no illusion as to the nature and circumstances of the French pox. But he goes on to append a pathology of the disease, which is taken from foreign writers and reflects the bewilderment of the faculty over the constitutional effects of the malady. As Erasmus said, in the letter quoted, it went all through the body, “not otherwise than the gout.” When it was first observed, it appeared to be constitutional from the outset. More particularly it covered the skin with “pustules” or “whelks” as if it had been a primary eruption like variola, to which it was compared; hence the names “great pox” and “small pox.” It was not until long after that our present pathology of primary, secondary and tertiary effects was worked out; in the earliest writings the constitutional effects were referred to an “inward cause,” as Clowes says, to some idiopathic corruption of the humours having the liver for their place of elaboration, or minera morbi. Thus the learned explanation of the malady, which Clowes adopts from foreign writers more skilled than himself in such disquisitions, has no organic unity with his own common-sense observations. In his Proved Practice he defers still farther to the academical view, as given in the treatise of John Almenar, a Spanish physician[847].
Although Clowes, in 1579, testifies to the very wide prevalence of the disease, to so great an extent, indeed, that it occupied the hospitals more than all other diseases put together, yet there is reason to think that it had by that time lost the terrible severity of its original epidemic type. The usual statement is that the disease abated both in extent and in intensity within twenty or thirty years of the Italian outbreak among the soldiery in 1494-96. A contemporary and ally of Clowes, John Read, of Gloucester, published in 1588 a volume of translations, from the Latin manuscript of the English surgeon of the 14th century, John Ardern, on the cure of fistulas, and from the treatise on wounds, etc. by the Spanish surgeon Arcaeus (Antwerp, 1574)[848]. In the latter he finds the following passage, which seems to describe the morbus Gallicus on its first appearance:—
“The French disease did bring with it a kind of universal skabbe, oftentimes with ring wormes, with the foulness of all the body called vitiligo and alopecia, running sores in the head called acores, and werts of both sortes, and many times with flegmatic or melancholic swellings or ulcers corrosive, filthie and cancrouse, and also running over the body, together with putrifying of the bone, and many times also accompanied with all kind of grief, with fevers, consumptions, and with many other differences of diseases.”