Disease, Hospital, and Beyond:
Syphilis and Society in Early Modern Toledo
Project funded by an SSHRC Grant 2006-2009
Dr. Berco's research program focuses on the social history of syphilis in early modern Spain. More specifically, he investigates how syphilis interacted with the city of Toledo, by looking not only at patients but also at how families and the community managed and responded to this disease. The implications of syphilis went well beyond hospital treatment and care to encompass local politics, economics, and social networks. Dr. Berco will start with the disease itself and the manner in which doctors and scientists constructed it, he will then move to those infected with it, and by association, their families and wider communities. Not only will this involve researching Toledo's syphilis hospital but it will also mean following patients after they left its walls. On a wider scale, he will focus on the relationship between Toledo's city council and syphilis by analysing regulations on hygiene and prostitution. Finally, given the demand of mercury for both the silver mines and for the treatment of syphilis, the interaction between imperial policy and disease will be investigated.
For many years, the study of disease in late medieval and early modern Europe focused for the most part on the seemingly unavoidable pestilence: The Black Death. Other illnesses such as syphilis played a second fiddle in terms of sheer presence to the great volume of scholarship on the plague. Perhaps the plague had been so rapidly catastrophic that other health issues just could not compare in terms of the vast demographic, social and economic consequences. Yet, already by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, syphilis seems to have become the overarching obsession of medical practitioners. Plague, though still present, was perhaps no longer the main killer of Europeans. Moreover, though not an illness that led to a quick death, syphilis' long term effects were equally horrifying: madness, paralysis, and finally death as it attacked the central nervous system after years of festering inside a patient. That modern scholars have largely ignored this illness until recently might have more to do with its connection to sexuality than anything else. The growth of the history of sexuality has made the task much easier. Moreover, the constant threat of AIDS over the last twenty years has probably reinvigorated interest in venereal diseases and their relationship to social processes.
Dr. Berco's research will be among the first to deal with this subject for Spain. Given the political significance of that country during the early modern era, it seems odd that no major research has been undertaken. The fruits of this project, then, will allow for more comparative approaches on the issue for the whole of Europe. Furthermore, this research is specifically designed to provide a comprehensive approach centred on social processes. Building on seminal scholarship on syphilis and society undertaken for areas such as England and Italy, this project will contribute to our understanding of how early modern societies coped and adapted when faced with the threat of a fatal venereal epidemic by telling the story of syphilis and those who suffered in its wake beyond the hospital.
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