The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present

Near the end of the century, a new and terrifying disease arrives suddenly from a distant continent. Infecting people through sex, it storms from country to country, defying all drugs and medical knowledge. The deadly disease provokes widespread fear and recrimination; medical authorities call the epidemic "the just rewards of unbridled lust"; a religious leader warns that "God has raised up new diseases against debauchery." The time was the 1490s; the place, Europe; the disease, syphilis; and the religious leader was none other than John Calvin. Throughout history, Western society has often viewed sickness as a punishment for sin. It has failed to prevent and cure diseases—especially diseases tied to sex—that were seen as the retribution of a wrathful God. The Wages of Sin, the remarkable history of these diseases, shows how society's views of particular afflictions often heightened the suffering of the sick and substituted condemnation for care. Peter Allen moves from the medieval diseases of lovesickness and leprosy through syphilis and bubonic plague, described by one writer as "a broom in the hands of the Almighty, with which He sweepeth the most nasty and uncomely corners of the universe." More recently, medical and social responses to masturbation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and AIDS in the twentieth round out Allen's timely and erudite study of the intersection of private morality and public health. The Wages of Sin tells the fascinating story of how ancient views on sex and sin have shaped, and continue to shape, religious life, medical practice, and private habits.

About the Author :
Peter Lewis Allen, a writer living in New York, has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Chicago and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School or the University of Pennsylvania.

Review :
"Allen searches out the premodern origins of the prejudice against the ill that found such vehement expression in the age of AIDS.... [He] is at his most forceful and persuasive in his examination of the cultural war fought over AIDS, conjuring up a time when politicians invoked the lessons of Sodom and Gomorrah as activists staged 'die-ins' on the floor of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York." - Mathew Battles, Boston Book Review; "Ever since Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, Western religious traditions have linked sex to suffering. Allen uses the techniques of literary criticism to trace this relationship from the medieval diagnoses of 'lovesickness' to the AIDS crisis of our own time.... [E]xhaustively searching through medical and theological texts and illustrations, [he] builds a fascinating and sometimes shocking case." - Library Journal