{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2023,9,20]],"date-time":"2023-09-20T08:46:49Z","timestamp":1695199609217},"reference-count":85,"publisher":"Cambridge University Press (CUP)","issue":"4","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2019,9,9]],"date-time":"2019-09-09T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1567987200000},"content-version":"unspecified","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/terms"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["cambridge.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Med. Hist."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2019,10]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>This article considers the social function of contagious disease as moderator of class relationships in England during the first half of the eighteenth century and takes into account the ways in which the \u2018communicability\u2019 of the plague, great pox (syphilis) and smallpox (variola) was used by authors to crystallise social interaction and tension along class lines. The essay begins by examining the representation of the plague, syphilis and smallpox in the medical tradition, before shifting its attention to the practice of maritime quarantine, as laid out by Richard Mead in his<jats:italic>Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion<\/jats:italic>(1720). By foregrounding medical writing on contagion through skin contact, I suggest that pornographic texts such as John Cleland\u2019s<jats:italic>The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure<\/jats:italic>(<jats:italic>Fanny Hill<\/jats:italic>) (1748) had an interventionist function. Cleland is often charged with sanitising the true horrors of sex work in this period. This article proposes that if we take the time to appreciate the way infectious cutaneous diseases were believed to operate and spread we can recognise the moments in which he not only alludes to disease but invokes it for structural and thematic purposes. In proposing this, I am challenging the dominant interpretation that the problematic realities of eighteenth-century prostitution, especially disease, are subordinated to the narrative\u2019s greater interest in erotic pleasure.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1017\/mdh.2019.46","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,9,9]],"date-time":"2019-09-09T08:42:24Z","timestamp":1568018544000},"page":"494-511","update-policy":"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1017\/policypage","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["An Uneasy Pleasure: Representing the Dangers of Skin-to-skin Contact in Eighteenth-century London \u2018<i>The William Bynum Prize Essay<\/i>\u2019"],"prefix":"10.1017","volume":"63","author":[{"given":"Sara","family":"Fernandes","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"56","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,9,9]]},"reference":[{"key":"S0025727319000462_r71","unstructured":"Ibid., 540."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r70","unstructured":"Tassie Gwilliam, \u2018Female Fraud: Counterfeit Maidenheads in the Eighteenth Century, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6, 4 (April, 1996), 539. Gwilliam draws on research by Antony E. Simpson, \u2018Vulnerability and the age of female consent: legal innovation and its effect on prosecutions for rape in eighteenth-century London\u2019, in G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 181\u2013205."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r78","unstructured":"Ibid., 186."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r76","unstructured":"Cleland, op. cit. (note 66), 184."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r66","first-page":"177","volume-title":"Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure","author":"Cleland","year":"2001"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r74","unstructured":"Ibid., 179."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r84","first-page":"46","volume-title":"Sexual Underworlds in the English Enlightenment","author":"Wagner","year":"1988"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r30","unstructured":"For a detailed discussion of this case see, Mary Margaret Stewart, \u201c\u2018And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse\u201d: syphilis and wives\u2019, in Linda E. Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 106\u201310."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r50","unstructured":"Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (London: Penguin, 2003), 45. The discrepancy between beggar and begger occurs in the original. All references to this edition."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r67","unstructured":"Norberg, op. cit. (note 34), 39."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r2","unstructured":"From the title of this work it is evident that Mead\u2019s theory was greatly influenced by Newton\u2019s mechanical philosophy, which proposed a particle theory of the body. For a detailed account of Mead\u2019s education and status within the medical academy, see Melvin Santer, Confronting Contagion, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 142\u20135."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r24","unstructured":"Claude Qu\u00e9tel, The History of Syphilis, Judith Braddock and Brian Pike (trans.) (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 5. Quotation brought to my attention by Barbara J. Dunlap, \u2018The problem of syphilitic children in eighteenth-century France and England\u2019, in Linda E. Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 114."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r34","first-page":"36","volume-title":"The Secret Malady","author":"Norberg"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r19","unstructured":"Ibid., 2."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r7","unstructured":"For a detailed overview of these experiments, see DeLacy, op. cit. (note 50), 148\u201351."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r42","unstructured":"For a detailed discussion of this project, see Andrew Zuckerman, \u2018Disease and Ventilation in the Royal Navy: The Woodenship Years\u2019, Eighteenth Century Life, 11 (November, 1987), 77\u201389."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r12","first-page":"2","volume-title":"A Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion","author":"Mead","year":"1720"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r9","unstructured":"Ibid."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r6","unstructured":"Ibid., 148."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r60","first-page":"301","article-title":"The Whores Rhetorick: Narrative, Pornography, and the Origins of the Novel","volume":"24","author":"Grantham Turner","year":"1995","journal-title":"Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r28","unstructured":"Ibid., 2\u20133."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r54","unstructured":"Defoe, op. cit. (note 50), 152."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r21","unstructured":"Ibid., 2."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r15","unstructured":"Ibid., 68."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r14","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1057\/9780230524323_3"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r5","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-1-137-57529-6"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r58","unstructured":"Ibid., 4."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r52","unstructured":"Ibid., 85."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r27","unstructured":"Ibid., 2."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r79","unstructured":"Ibid., 187."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r38","unstructured":"Ibid., 17."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r32","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"217","DOI":"10.1017\/9781580466004","volume-title":"The Royal Doctors, 1485\u20131714","author":"Lane Furdell","year":"2001"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r39","unstructured":"Ibid., 24."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r11","first-page":"202","volume-title":"Medicine and the Five Senses","author":"Gilman","year":"1993"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r4","unstructured":"This justification was added to later editions of his Short Discourse. Richard Mead, Short Discourse, 8th edition (London: printed by Sam Buckley, 1722), 137\u20138. This edition is cited by Zuckerman, ibid., 284."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r8","unstructured":"Anton Deidier, Trait\u00e9 de la Peste, cited in ibid., 151."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r63","unstructured":"Thomas Alan Holmes, \u2018Sexual Positions and Sexual Politics: John Cleland\u2019s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure\u2019, South Atlantic Review, 74, 1 (Winter, 2009), 134."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r40","unstructured":"This is not to say that the ultimate cause was ascribed to the sailor. The link between disease and the savage other was also pervasive. There are sources that even promote disease as a somewhat necessary evil of expansion and adventure. See William Turnbull, The Naval Surgeon (London: printed for Richard Phillips, 1806), v."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r25","first-page":"iii","volume-title":"A Modest Defence of Publick Stews","author":"Mandeville","year":"1740"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r22","unstructured":"William Clowes, Brief and Necessary Treatise, cited by Kevin Siena in \u2018The clean and the foul: paupers and the pox in London hospitals, c.1550\u2013c.1700\u2019, in Kevin Siena (ed.), Sins of the Flesh (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 261."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r20","unstructured":"Ibid., 1\u20132."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r29","unstructured":"Ibid., 4."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r41","unstructured":"Mead, op. cit., (note 12), 2."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r43","first-page":"xi","volume-title":"An Inquiry Into the Origin and Antiquity of the Lues Venerea; with Observations on its Introduction and Progress in the Islands of the South Seas","author":"Turnbull","year":"1786"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r59","unstructured":"Randolph Trumbach has argued that Fanny Hillmaintains the fantasy that \u2018sex [work] \u2026 is safe, comfortable and accompanied by love\u2019. He also asserts that Cleland\u2019s representation of prostitution differs from the realities of prostitution in the eighteenth century in five ways: \u2018it is free of drunkenness, it is not associated with crime, it all takes place in safe, indoor environments, and it is a vice, more or less, of the middle and upper ranks of society\u2019. See Randolph Trumbach, \u2018Modern prostitution and gender in Fanny Hill: libertine and Domesticated fantasy\u2019, in G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 72 and 80. David Weed charges Cleland with \u2018verbally airbrushing the prostitute\u2019s looks and the harsh realities of their working conditions\u2019. See, David Weed, \u2018Fitting Fanny: Cleland\u2019s \u201cMemoirs\u201d and the Politics of Male Pleasure\u2019, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 31, 1 (Autumn, 1997), 7. Laura J. Rosenthal goes as far as coining the term \u2018pornotopia\u2019 in order to categorise what she sees as Fanny\u2019s \u2018escape from the usual shifting tides of fortune\u2019, especially her apparent escape from venereal infection. See Laura J. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 121\u20133. On page 121 she states unequivocally that Fanny \u2018never contracts venereal disease\u2019. Rosenthal\u2019s argument is reiterated by Ann Lewis and Markman Ellis in their \u2018Introduction\u2019 to Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture: Sex, Commerce and Morality (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 10. They claim that Fanny Hill is a \u2018polite pornotopia\u2019 in which \u2018the prostitute\u2019s sex work is clean, safe, healthy and pleasurable\u2019. A notable exception to this trend is Lena Olsson\u2019s essay \u2018Idealized and realistic portrayals of prostitution in John Cleland\u2019s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure\u2019, in Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson (eds), Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influences (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 81\u2013101. Olsson critiques the five points raised by Trumbach and offers astute readings of Mrs Brown\u2019s brothel, alcoholism, extortion and vulgarity as depicted in the novel. She also points out that the sailor scene is \u2018potentially the most dangerous\u2019; however, she goes on to conclude that Fanny appears to avoid infection: 98\u201399."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r47","first-page":"11","volume-title":"The Plague at Marseilles Consider\u2019d","author":"Bradley","year":"1721"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r75","unstructured":"While these may be symptoms of other infections, within the context of the second half of the novel they are highly suggestive of venereal infection."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r65","unstructured":"Bobke, op. cit., (note 61), 468."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r45","unstructured":"Ibid."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r77","unstructured":"Ibid., 86."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r44","volume-title":"British Naval Documents 1204\u20131960","author":"Hattendorf et al.","year":"1993"},{"key":"#cr-split#-S0025727319000462_r61.1","unstructured":"There is a wealth of interpretation of eighteenth-century sodomy shaming and the role of sodomy within Fanny Hill. Randolph Trumbach's 1977 article 'London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behaviour and Western Culture in the 18th Century' confirms that, in Europe, homosexuality was 'confined to an illicit subculture' and was condemned by the scriptures and because it was deemed unnatural. See Randolph Trumbach, 'London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behaviour and Western Culture in the 18th Century', Journal of Social History, 11, 1 (Autumn, 1977), 3. Trumbach also contributes to the discourse on sodomy shaming in a 1988 essay, op. cit. (note 59), 69-85. Both arguments source evidence from papers produced by the Society for the Reformation of Manners, founded in 1691 to cleanse the streets of 'lewd night-walkers and most detestable sodomites'. Annamarie Jagose's 2007 article \"'Critical Extasy\": Orgasm and Sensibility in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure' applies Teresa Braunschneider's 2002 work to a reading of Fanny Hill. Jagose posits that Cleland's 'prioritisation of male-female intercourse', Fanny's insistence on linear orgasm and the 'fluid economy' of mutual climax be read within the framework of Teresa Braunschneider's argument that the eighteenth-century, while promoting heteronormative relationships at an institutional level, recognised that 'opposite-gender desire was not taken for granted as natural or inevitable"},{"key":"#cr-split#-S0025727319000462_r61.2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"rather, it emerges as a cultural project that requires tremendous energy to sustain'. See, Annamarie Jagose, \"'Critical Extasy\": Orgasm and Sensibility in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure', Signs, 32, 2 (Winter, 2007), 461. Jagose cites Teresa Braunschneider, 'Maidenly Amusements: Narrating Female Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century England' (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2002), 14. Danielle Bobker's 2010 article 'Sodomy, Geography, and Misdirection in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure' compares Memoirs to Cleland's novel criticism, enabling her to make a compelling case about Cleland's methodology, which is, '[making] \u2026 bad things look good, then [making] good things look better': 1037.","DOI":"10.1086\/508215"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r57","unstructured":"Ibid., 281."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r48","unstructured":"Ibid., 57."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r55","unstructured":"Ibid., 3."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r26","unstructured":"Ibid., viii."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r72","unstructured":"Cleland, op. cit. (note 66), 179."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r80","unstructured":"Turner, op. cit. (note 35), 9."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r56","unstructured":"Ibid., 4."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r18","unstructured":"Daniel Turner, Syphilis: A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease (London: printed for R. Bonwicke, 1717), 1. For a discussion of this text and Turner\u2019s treatment of venereal patients see, Philip K. Wilson, \u2018Exposing the secret disease: recognizing and treating syphilis in Daniel Turner\u2019s London\u2019, in Linda E. Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 68\u201384."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r13","unstructured":"Ibid., 48."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r83","unstructured":"Ibid."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Not only did these comparisons prevail throughout the eighteenth century: they can be traced back to the Renaissance. See ibid., 150\u20131 and Agnieszka Steczowicz, \u2018Paradoxical diseases in the late Renaissance: the cases of syphilis and the plague\u2019, in George Sebastian Rousseau et\u00a0al., Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 269\u201384.","DOI":"10.1057\/9780230524323_12"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r53","unstructured":"Mead, op. cit., (note 12), 51."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r3","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1353\/bhm.2004.0105"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r37","unstructured":"Mead, op. cit., (note 12), 21."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r46","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.3138\/utq.79.4.1035"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r35","first-page":"98","volume-title":"Syphilis: A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease","author":"Turner","year":"1724"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r64","unstructured":"For evidence that the navy was an emerging power, see Portsmouth Record Series Portsmouth Dockyard Papers 1774\u201383: The American War, compiled by R.J.B. Knight, Portsmouth: City of Portsmouth, 1987 and John B. Hattendorf et\u00a0al.\u00a0(eds), British Naval Documents 1204\u20131960. For more on the representation of this emerging power in the novel see, C. Northcote Parkinson, Portsmouth Point (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949)."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r81","unstructured":"Ibid., 367."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r68","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.2307\/450893"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r31","unstructured":"Dunlap, op. cit. (note 24), 114."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r69","unstructured":"Cleland, op. cit. (note 66), 179."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Abraham Rees, The Cyclop\u00e6dia or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, Volume XXIII (London: printed for Longman, Hurst, and Rees, 1819), no pagination.","DOI":"10.5962\/bhl.title.58224"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r17","first-page":"59","volume-title":"Illness as Metaphor","author":"Sontag","year":"2002"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r23","unstructured":"Turner, op. cit. (note 18), 3."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r51","unstructured":"Ibid., 154."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r33","first-page":"39","volume-title":"A Treatise on the Venereal Disease","author":"Hunter","year":"1788"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r62","unstructured":"Jagose, ibid., 468."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r16","first-page":"8","volume-title":"A Medical History of Skin","author":"Siena","year":"2013"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r49","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1098\/rstl.1702.0040"},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r73","unstructured":"Ibid., 180."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r82","unstructured":"Siena, op. cit. (note 22), 276."},{"key":"S0025727319000462_r36","unstructured":"Norberg, op. cit. (note 34), 35."}],"container-title":["Medical History"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/services\/aop-cambridge-core\/content\/view\/S0025727319000462","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2023,9,20]],"date-time":"2023-09-20T01:07:38Z","timestamp":1695172058000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/product\/identifier\/S0025727319000462\/type\/journal_article"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2019,9,9]]},"references-count":85,"journal-issue":{"issue":"4","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2019,10]]}},"alternative-id":["S0025727319000462"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1017\/mdh.2019.46","relation":{},"ISSN":["0025-7273","2048-8343"],"issn-type":[{"value":"0025-7273","type":"print"},{"value":"2048-8343","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2019,9,9]]},"assertion":[{"value":"\u00a9 The Author 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press.\u00a0","name":"copyright","label":"Copyright","group":{"name":"copyright_and_licensing","label":"Copyright and Licensing"}}]}}