À la recherche du « cas » perdu : la problématique de l’origine dans les récits de la vérole

Abstract

Syphilis blossoms at the intersection between an idiosyncratic humoral determinism and a public illness, between that which originates from the self and that imposed by an exterior force. Revealing a zone of indisctinction between that which belongs to a specific personal history and that which affects other bodies and elements, the disease complicates the search for the original case, to which all the numerous treatises dealing with this illness are dedicated. This study first focuses on the difficult quest, doomed to failure from the start, for the first case triggering the epidemic in Europe. Next, the specific hermeneutics, which cases of the French disease called for, will be examined, for the practitioner had to reconstruct the dynamics of contagion. The project of writing the history of this illness or of one of its specific occurrences confronts us either with the impossibility of such an account or entails a revelation, unmasking those who are concealing the said illness. Yet it is precisely this difficult etiology which becomes a preferred subject for the “literary account” and which individuals such as the midwife Louise Bourgeois are able to undertake. Through the very fact that it is so difficult to historicize, identify and treat, syphilis becomes a discursive agent in its own right.

Keywords

• Renaissance
• origin of syphilis
• medical treatises
• process of contagion