Syphilis: Origin Story. Or, Early Modern Europeans Don’t Know Where It Came From, Current Scholars Don’t Know Where It Came From, and a Lot of Poxy Penises and Vulvas Suffered in Between

Bodies Episode #2 of 4. From whence came the poxiest of poxes? Averill and Marissa dive into the debates surrounding the origin of syphilis, with historians, paleobiologists, forensic anthropologists, and Shakespeare all weighing in. Further Reading: Kevin Siena, Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2005); Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, The great pox : the French disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1997); and Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy(The University of North Carolina Press, 2013). A complete bibliography and transcript can be found at digpodcast.org. 

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