Quietly & Safely Insane

Okay, this is for Kayf and anybody else who was either thinking "OMFG what just happened with the-- ohmygodarrrrrghhhh" while reading Chapter 14 of Justice in Surrender, or who, alternatively, might be doing any kind of historical fiction where, for some reason, the rough-and-ready medical treatments of STDs is included. *whistles nonchalantly*

The word 'gonorrhea' itself has been around since at least the 1520s, utilising the neo-Latin 'gonad' and 'rheum' to indicate the flow of discharge, with the variant spelling 'gomoria' evoking Biblical associations of Sodom & Gomorrah.[1]

So, why 'clap'? There are multiple theories, ranging from a bastardisation of 'collapse' when used to codify treatment for GIs during World War II, to dodgy French etymology, and also the idea that pre-penicillin treatment involved 'clapping' the penis to remove urethral blockage.

Given that the earliest use of 'clap' as a slang term is ca.1587,[2 - If anyone can actually trace and cite this usage for me, I'll bake you cookies, because I can't find the bugger.] we can safely rule out the GI theory. The French etymology - suggesting 'clap' comes from clapoir/clapier as Middle French terms for 'bubo' and 'brothel'[3] - does make a great deal of sense, especially when seen as a foreign adoption of the term. French, of course, has had its own slang for gonorrhea for centuries: chaude pisse, or 'hot piss'.[4]

Certainly, by the eighteenth century, 'clap' was a common enough term, as seen both by the famed brothel/molly house keeper known as 'Mother Clap'[5, 6, 7 and 8], and its vernacular usage in, for example, John Marten's 1709 A Treatise Of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, In both Sexes[9].

It is also true that, pre-antibiotics, treatment for gonorrhea seems to have included the injection of mercury solution or colloidal silver into the urethra, via a large-gauge syringe,[10] much as in contemporaneous treatments for syphilis. The penis would then be squeezed to help pass the solution (and discharge, blockage etc.), or - in some versions - 'clapped' with the hands, or by using a book or other implement.[11]

Admittedly, in JiS, I substituted magic for mercury, but there you go. Such are the benefits of fantasy universes. There are also references in this discussion on Snopes to an extremely prosaic US Navy treatment that, allegedly, continues today:

...sailor was instructed to lay penis on table, urology tech (or maybe it was a doctor) hits it with a rubber mallet. Blood, pus and piss go flying everywhere. Problem solved.

Whoa. I don't even have one and my eyes are watering.

The video mentioned in this article by Daniel Lende, featuring sex therapist Dr. Carol Clark demonstrating the 'clap' technique (albeit without a second participant) appears sadly to have been removed, but I think her face in this still says a lot:



Not that I think for a moment anyone ever really carried that action out at eye level, but all the same....

In terms of etymology, 'clapped' probably quickly came to mean the same thing as 'pox'd', i.e. a more general identification of veneral disease, though it seems impossible to definitively prove whether it was the French root of the word, or the medical action (or, indeed, both) that gifted this particular term to posterity.

Out of interest, and thinking about VD and etymology in general, I quote this from Rictor Norton's article concerning the 1726 raid on Mother Clap's molly house, which occurred during a period of intense public hysteria over homosexuality and gay subcultures in London.

As part of the sodomy trial of George Whittle, one Drake Stoneman, a neighbour of Whittle's Royal Oak tavern, testified to men in Whittle's back room who, Stoneman claimed, were 'exposing to each other’s Sight what they ought to have conceal’d. I have heard some of them say, Mine is the best. Yours has been Battersea’d.'

Yep. Battersea'd. Best verb ever? I think so. Beautifully illustrating the ways in which slang develops, Norton goes on to say:

‘Battersea’d’, nowhere else recorded in this verb form, probably is related to the common slang injunction ‘you must go to Battersea, to be cut for the simples’. ‘Simples’ were medicinal herbs grown in large quantities at Battersea Park at this time, and this phrase meant ‘to be cured of one’s folly’. In the context of the trial, it would seem that one man’s penis bore evidence of having been treated for venereal disease, but the slang term more likely meant that his penis was a ripe candidate for being treated for venereal disease, and ‘Battersea’d’ is probably a synonym for ‘clapped’. The man’s penis is more likely to bear the physical marks of the pox, than the visible evidence of being treated for it. Venereal disease during this period was treated either with mercury, either rubbed in or taken internally, or with balsalmic salves containing rhubarb, juniper, sassafras, saffron, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and various astringents and diuretics, taken internally, or rubbed in, or injected into the urethra by a syringe. The compounds of polygonum, tomentilla, thyme, and rosa rubra would probably be gathered at Battersea. Many of the ointments to be applied externally also contained a mercury dilution to cause the ulcers to discharge their contents. If the testicles began to swell, fenugreek had to be applied morning and evening. Purgatives were generally favoured over balsalms, and salivation was increasingly common (the ingestion of mercury to provoke spitting and slavering). It is just possible that ‘Battersea’d’ means ‘covered with curative ointment’, but these ointments were not visually remarkable; it is far more likely that the ‘Battersea’d’ penis was covered with the pustules, tubercles, shankers, ulcers, nodes, tumours, swellings, inflammatory buboes and blotches associated with the clap.

CITE: Rictor Norton, "Mother Clap's Molly House", The Gay Subculture in Georgian England, 5 February 2005 <http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/mother.htm>.

Of course, none of this touches on treatments or historical studies of gonnorhea in women, which - aside from making Feminist Ryan Gosling sad - obviously leaves out a massive swathe of stuff I don't wish to completely ignore, or indeed make light of.

Not least among that is the salient point that - for a large number of women - infection was through their husbands, and led to horrible complications both for them and their children (e.g., occurrences of gonococcal ophthalmia neonatorum in infants), especially in a period where women of certain classes where frequently not educated in matters of sexual health, or how to even know that there was something wrong. There's a whole other debate here about how this tied in to the elision of medical thought and 'moral decency' in the Christian society of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe - my first thought is a comparison to Henrik Ibsen's treatment of Dr. Rank in A Doll's House: a man who is dying of inherited syphilis, the ultimate 'sins of the father'. Daniel Lende also points us towards what he describes as a 'fascinating and terrible'[12] article by C.V. Roman, from the 1918 Journal of the National Medical Association, entitled Syllabus of Lecture to Colored Soldiers at Camps Grant, Stewart, Hill, and Humphreys.

Couched in the tub-thumpingly sanctimonious and impassioned verbiage of the time, Roman writes:

Gonorrhea Clap, “running range,” is the most dangerous of the three [venereal diseases]; because the most easily spread, the most lightly considered (only a cold) and the most difficult to cure. It begins as a little smarting when urine is passed, finally pain, swelling and a discharge that is highly contagious – the smallest bit of it in the eye may destroy vision.

This is a frequent cause of sore eyes and blindness in babies – mother, usually a pure, good woman, has been, unknown to her, infected by her husband, and she in turn infected the baby while passing through the birth canal.

A man that would willfully put out the eyes of an innocent baby is the meanest of criminals. Yet that is what a man does who takes clap to the marriage bed. If there is any Hell, I think the hottest pace in it ought to be reserved for the man who willfully spreads venereal disease. A man with no respect for a pure woman is not fit to live.

So, he'd have no problem reintroducing the whole 'thumping it with a book' thing, then.

Anyway, there you are. Yet more useless information from the vaults. I really hope I didn't make anybody nauseous.