A man of common understanding: venereal disease, myth and reading as a protective practice in eighteenth-century Britain

The discourse on venereal disease, written across numerous treatises and dissertations throughout the period, worked to focalise questions of male sexual desire and agency. In this chapter, I explore the medical writing on venereal disease alongside the prose fiction of Tobias Smollett and the life writing of James Boswell in order to showcase how writing about sexual infection in this period provided a canvas upon which questions of male ability and debility were writ large. Reading medical observations on the disease reveals how men were sometimes encouraged not to fear medical knowledge but to become men of common understanding; to be, in other words, agents of their own self-recovery. While writers like Smollett used the novel form to model men’s mastery of their own sexual health, private diary accounts like Boswell’s instead foreground his distrust of medical intervention in the wake of his infection, before detailing the anxieties that underpinned the distemper’s cure.