The Plague of Lust, Vol. 1 (of 2)

First published in 1889, this rigorous scholarly work shattered a prevailing myth of its era: that venereal disease was a New World import, carried back to Europe by Columbus's sailors. Julius Rosenbaum marshaled decades of classical scholarship, literary evidence, and medical documentation to demonstrate that syphilis, gonorrhea, and related afflictions had plagued Mediterranean civilizations, ancient Persia, and the Far East for millennia before the Renaissance. Through meticulous analysis of Greek, Roman, and Arabic sources, Rosenbaum traces these diseases across centuries of classical literature, examining how ancient physicians understood and treated them, and how religious and secular authorities regulated sexual behavior in response. The work stands as a landmark of medical historiography, representing a determined effort to apply empirical methods to the fraught intersection of sexuality, disease, and historical myth-making. For readers interested in the history of medicine, the social dynamics of sexuality in antiquity, or the construction of medical knowledge itself, this volume remains a foundational text that reframes our understanding of disease, desire, and civilization's oldest anxieties.