“By age 35, 8 per cent of Chester’s population had been infected with syphilis”
A pioneering new study has provided statistical information about the likely rate of venereal disease in the city of Chester in the 18th century. Professor Simon Szreter (left), who carried out the research, discusses some of his finds
What have you discovered about rates of venereal disease in early modern Chester? My research focuses on Chester between 1773 and 1775. My investigations into the rate at which adult residents were admitted to Chester’s infirmary for treatment of the ‘pox’ (what we now know as syphilis) suggest that, by age 35, almost exactly 8 per cent of the city’s population (which numbered 14,713 in 1774) had contracted the infection. By comparison, less densely populated rural settlements within a 10-mile radius of the city, in west Cheshire and north-east Wales, had a rate of just under 1 per cent.
This is the first time anyone has been able to make quantitative estimates of the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) for any period before the late 19th century. The research was made possible by the survival of two sets of records: the admissions register for Chester Infirmary between 1773 and 1775, and an exactly contemporaneous census of the city taken by local physician Dr John Haygarth. How were STIs identified and treated? Contemporary physicians described the STIs as a “venereal distemper”. I make a distinction between those sufferers who were retained as inpatients in the infirmary for at least 35 days, which are counted as pox cases, and all others, which are not.
It was generally thought that ‘the clap’ (identified today as gonorrhoea and chlamydia) and ‘the pox’ were less and more severe versions, respectively, of a single disease entity. A wide variety of prescriptions, quack cures and self-medications were used for the former, whereas for those unfortunate enough to have caught syphilis, it was widely believed that mercury (pictured below) was an effective treatment. Syphilitic patients were kept inside for 35 days and dosed with mercury to promote salivation – this, it was thought, would expel the disease from the body. Such treatment was debilitating and may occasionally even have been fatal. How representative of Britain as a whole were Chester’s STI rates during this period? Although there is currently no evidence to evaluate this, there’s no reason to suppose Chester was epidemiologically or sexually atypical for a county town of its size. Social life and sexual behaviour in larger provincial cities was probably quite different – at least for a proportion of those urban populations – to more rural settlements of early modern
England and Wales.