The Plague of Lust, Vol. 2 (of 2): Being a History of Venereal Disease in Classical AntiquityRosenbaum, Julius
History
The Plague of Lust, Vol. 2 (of 2): Being a History of Venereal Disease in Classical Antiquity
Rosenbaum, Julius
Sexually transmitted diseases -- History
Now to pass on to the medical point of view, no one presumably will
deny that the mouth of the _fellator_ must necessarily be exposed
to various complaints as a consequence of his Vice. Nevertheless
there prevails universally, so far as our studies up to the present
have enabled us to judge, complete silence among the Physicians of
Antiquity as to the practice of λεσβιάζειν (to Lesbianize, to practise
_fellation_) as a cause occasioning morbid affections of the mouth
and the contiguous parts. This is the more surprising, as we find
that non-professional Writers are not entirely unacquainted with such
effects, as we shall show directly. For our purpose this silence is
doubly unfortunate, depriving us as it does of all means of submitting
such affections of the mouth as are described by Physicians to any
proper appreciation in regard to their ætiological relationships,—an
appreciation that in any case must naturally have been in view of our
knowledge of the vice of the _fellator_ one of extreme difficulty.
The difficulty is this: _fellator_ and _fellatrix_, equally with the
_Cunnilingue_, the fornicater and fornicatrix, were liable to suffer
from ulcers of the throat, for example, as a result of their peculiar
vice, but in the former case these ulcers were primary, in the latter
secondary,—now how is an inquirer to discover any diagnostic sign here,
whereby to distinguish the one class from the other? Yet all the while,
certainty on this point is of the very highest importance in view of
the question as to the existence of Venereal disease in Antiquity,
the chief argument always alleged against accepting the fact of such
existence being the absence of secondary symptoms such as are nowadays
commonly met with, especially about the throat[34].
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