FREE: POX Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis by Deborah Hayden

The listing, POX Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis by Deborah Hayden has ended.

This is a hardback, ex-library book with the library binding and all the usual stickers.

When Beethoven composed "Ode to Joy," was he experiencing euphoria caused by the last stages of syphilis? Did Abraham Lincoln contract the dreaded disease from a prostitute around 1835? Was The Portrait of Dorian Gray a secret parable for Oscar Wilde's own veneral affliction? The answers to these provocative questions are likely "yes," claims scholar Deborah Hayden in her riveting investigation of the effects of the "Pox" on the lives and works of seminal figures from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Today, syphilis is easily treated with penicillin. But at any given time in the nineteenth century, approximately 15% of the population in Europe and America may have been afflicted with this chronic, incurable disease. Sufferers of syphilis experienced excruciating pain, wild euphoria and suicidal depression, megalomania and paranoia--and, in the late stages of the disease, terrifying madmess. Syphilis profoundly affected their wouldview, their sexual behavior and personality, and, of course, their art.

Despite the scope of the disease and the unimaginable suffering of its victims, little has been written about the experience by or about people who had syphilis. Shrouded in shame and secrecy, the disease turned its victims into tormented outsiders, obsessively guarding the mysteries of what syphilis victim Isak Dinesen called "life's bitter secret."

Hayden charges that biographers and historians have vastly underestimated the extraordinary impact of this disease on the lives and works of people who have profoundly influenced Western culture--for better or for worse. In fascinating detail, Hayden explores the impact of syphilis on figures well known to have suffered from it, including Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, as well as others whose diagnoses have been hotly debated.