The history of STDs

The STD epidemic is not limited to today’s youth, oh no. Some STDs (and their scientifically dubious and painful treatments) date back several hundred years. Let’s take a look at some of the older ones and the myths about them that caused some pretty unorthodox treatment throughout STD history:

Herpes

Herpes has been around since ancient Greek times; in fact, we owe the name to the Greeks, which means roughly “to creep or crawl,” presumably a reference to the spread of skin lesions. Although local STD tests weren’t available until long after the virus was identified in 1919, early civilizations were able to see that it was a real problem: the Roman Emperor Tiberius introduced a ban on kissing at public events to try to slow the spread. . Not much is known about early attempts to treat the disease, but be thankful you weren’t around during Doctor Celsus’s experimental phase: he advocated sores being cauterized with a hot iron!

Certainly the problem never went away: Shakespeare referred to herpes as “blistering plagues,” implying the extent of the epidemic. A common belief at the time was that the disease was caused by insect bites, which seems like an obvious explanation given the sores the sexually transmitted disease creates.

Syphilis

Mercury was the remedy of choice for syphilis in the Middle Ages – understanding of the routes of the sexually transmitted disease and this treatment gave rise to the expression: “A night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury” . This was administered orally or by direct contact with the skin, although one of the more unlikely methods involved fumigation, where the patient was placed in a closed box with only the head protruding from. The box contained mercury and a fire started under it, causing it to vaporize. It wasn’t very effective, but it was very, very uncomfortable. Because syphilis sores tend to go away on their own after a while, many people believed that almost any remedy would cure them in the history of STDs!

As the sexually transmitted disease became better understood, the ability to cure it increased. In 1908, the arsenic-based drug Salvarsan was developed and, while not 100% effective, it was a huge step forward. Its lack of efficacy in the tertiary phase of STDs led to the use of another disease as a cure: malaria. Since it seemed that people with high fevers could be cured of syphilis, malaria was used to induce an initial fever, which was considered an acceptable risk because malaria could be treated with quinine. Penicillin eventually limited these two treatments to the history of STDs.

gonorrhea

Before the days of local STD testing, gonorrhea was often confused with syphilis, since without a microscope, the two had very similar symptoms and were often silent. Of course, if you were “diagnosed” with the disease, you’re in for an unfortunate treatment. According to some, the syringes found aboard the Mary Rose were designed to inject liquid mercury into the urethra of a crew member suffering from the disease. In the 19th century, silver nitrate was a widely used drug, which was later replaced by Protargol. A colloidal silver replaced this and it was widely used until antibiotics came to the rescue in the 1940s.

So if you think local STD testing and treatment is a painful process now, think of the poor people who were treated with mercury or arsenic all those years ago, and thank goodness for antibiotics!