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Quotes by Peter Lewis Allen

Even more than this, however, the sick - like lepers - were often reviled because people believed that they had brought their torments upon themselves.
– Peter Lewis Allen
Hospitals in early modern Europe were charitable institutions, designed to provide care and shelter to the sick poor.
– Peter Lewis Allen
It (mercury) could be taken internally, for example: one eighteenth-century recipe called for mixing the liquid metal with hot chocolate, though the author cautioned against this exotic beverage because he felt that the chocolate was too dangerous.
– Peter Lewis Allen
Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab; in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the library to see what the ancients had said.
– Peter Lewis Allen
Often, city fathers blamed prostitutes for the disease, and some threatened to brand their cheeks with hot iron if they did not desist from their vices.
– Peter Lewis Allen
Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived when it struck America in the 1980s.
– Peter Lewis Allen
Regardless of its geographic origin, people quickly began to notice that the pox traveled from one person to another. They sometimes blamed transmission on common and morally innocuous practices - drinking from a common cup, kissing friends in church, following a syphilitic comrade on the latrine.
– Peter Lewis Allen
Sexual morality was becoming stricter, and prostitutes were usually condemned far more savagely than the men who used their services.
– Peter Lewis Allen
Shortly after Christopher Columbus and his sailors returned from their voyage to the New World, a horrifying new disease began to make its way around the Old. The pox, as it was often called, erupted with dramatic severity.
– Peter Lewis Allen
Some cast the blame on supernatural powers - the planets, the stars, God, or even witches. Galenists claimed that the pox came from corrupted air, or even, like lovesickness, from an excess of black bile.
– Peter Lewis Allen
The idea of infection began to be taken far more seriously than it ever had before. Hospitals transformed themselves in response to the new plague - sometimes for the better, but often for the worse, as when, in fear, they cast their ulcerated patients out into the streets.
– Peter Lewis Allen
The public was appalled by this scourge. Physicians too, von Hutten reported, were so revolted that they would not even touch their patients.
– Peter Lewis Allen
This was certainly a logical assumption: soldiers and prostitutes, traditionally associated with sexual license and moral disorder, were among the first victims, and the connection became even closer when people noticed that the disease's first sores often turned up on the genital organs.
– Peter Lewis Allen
Was this an old disease, and, if so, which one? If it was new, what did that say about the state of medical knowledge? And in any case, how could physicians make sense of it?
– Peter Lewis Allen