Interesting but needs balance. Author Peter Lewis Allen has a PhD in Comparative Literature, specializing in European Medieval topics. His interest in the sociology of sexually transmitted diseases sprung from his reaction to his lover’s death from AIDS. Unfortunately, he approaches the subject as an advocate, not as a historian; thus his choice of topics is colored by the theme that Christianity has treated diseases, particularly “loathsome” diseases, as the result of sin.

Allen’s chapters cover

* “Lovesickness”, as it was diagnosed in Medieval times;
* Leprosy
* Syphilis
* Bubonic plague
* Masturbation
* AIDS

The things that stands out here at first glance is “lovesickness” and masturbation aren’t really diseases, and leprosy and bubonic plague aren’t usually considered sexually transmitted diseases. (I suppose it’s possible in both cases but it isn’t what you would consider the normal route of infection). But they fit in with Allen’s theme of religious condemnation of the ill as the authors of their own illness. I was surprised to find “lovesickness” was considered a legitimate condition in Classical and Medieval times, resulting from the inaccessibility of the person desired; the prescription, justified by Classical and Arab authors, was to have sex with somebody else. Often. Buy a slave girl if necessary; in fact, buy several slave girls and rotate them as you get bored. Needless to say the Church frowned on this; Allen comes up with a case of a physician being burned at the stake for recommending it (it turns out he was garroted first, and he had run afoul of doctrine for a number of things, not just sex for lovesickness).

Continuing with leprosy, Allen documents various humiliations Biblical and Medieval lepers had to put up with – isolation from society and ill-treatment. Allen’s lack of any medical training or medical advice begins to show up her. Allen describes leprosy as an “African” disease; I admit my own readings on leprosy are random and cursory but enough to note that the Biblical disease translated as “leprosy” was probably something else; leprosy – at least what’s now called leprosy – seems to be a cold climate disease rather than a tropical one. It also causes diagnostic skeletal changes – and these, IIRC, don’t show up before the 15th century. Finally, Allen, in decrying the isolation inflicted on medieval lepers, ignores an obvious and standard public health response to diseases that are contagious and have no known treatment – quarantine. Maybe lepers were treated cruelly, and perhaps the Church blamed them unjustly – but keeping them apart from the rest of society was a perfectly valid response.

Syphilis, of course, really is sexually transmitted; Allen here is critical of society blaming women for it, particularly prostitutes, rather than men. Well, yes, women did get treated unfairly throughout most of history and throughout most of the world even now. Allen is also very critical of doctors using mercury as a syphilis treatment; as it happens my understanding is topical mercury and other heavy metal compounds were the only things that even had a slight effect on syphilis; therefore the doctors were using the best practices of the day.

The chapter on bubonic plague is again supposed to illustrate the cruelty of Church and society; the argument is that the Church saw the plague as a punishment from God for sin – in general, not just sexual sins. This chapter is mostly here, I suspect, to provide comparison for Allen’s later chapter on AIDS.

Masturbation isn’t a disease at all, of course. It’s certainly true that it was seen as a sin (Allen does correct the misapprehension that the “sin” of Onan in the Bible was masturbation – hence the euphemism “Onanism”. Onan’s sin was refusing to have sex with his brother’s widow, not “spilling his seed on the ground”). Allen comes up with a lot of 19th and early 20th century references to the supposed ill effects of masturbation, which as we all know results in blindness and insanity. I wasn’t aware the length that some doctors were willing to go to prevent it; clitorodectomy was practiced by a number of doctors on female patients who engaged in – or even presented with “symptoms” of engaging in – masturbation; Allen tracks down one doctor who routinely performed the operation on any female patient who came to him for any reason at all (Allen does note that the man was condemned by the medical profession once this came to light).

That brings us to Allen’s pièce de résistance; the chapter on AIDS. By analogy, he claims AIDS victims were treated the same way lepers, syphilitics, and plague victims were in earlier times, and the complicit parties are the US Government – particularly the Reagan, Bush and even the Clinton administrations – and Christianity, particularly the Catholic church. However, his specific argument is not that AIDS patients were ostracized, but that the aforementioned parties didn’t budget enough money on AIDS prevention and blocked what prevention methods were available (condom use). This is a difficult argument to counter – because there’s no data. Allen’s argument that “thousands” of lives would have been saved if only the US government had funded condom use seems disingenuous – after all, in the face of the best efforts of governments there are numerous people using homeopathy and rejecting vaccines. Allen has some statistics that show “safe sex” campaigns in the US and elsewhere were successful in reducing AIDS incidence, but I don’t know for sure if this is all the data available. To be fair, Allen is a little critical of gay activists, suggesting that maybe ACT UP and GMHC may have hurt their cause – assuming their cause was promoting health – by some of their more egregious tactics, and that some gays “viewed gay rights as inseparable from the freedom to have sex as often as possible, and with few, if any, constraints”. Allen also, in his concluding chapter, acknowledges that there are elements of Christianity “that serve as an inspiration to me”.

Worth it for the areas where Allen has expertise – medieval literature on disease; somewhat questionable when he’s acting as an advocate. Extensive references and endnotes. Illustrations from medieval manuscripts (and some of various antimasturbatory devices from the 19th century for that chapter). ( )