During a medical residency in 1830s Berlin, Dr. Julius Rosenbaum turned his mind toward the afflictions of ancient genitals. Six years later, he published a two-volume tome on the subject of sexually transmitted diseases in antiquity, which was translated into English in 1901 by “An Oxford M.A.” as The Plague of Lust. The translation came with a caution: “Needless to say the Book in no way appeals,—or is meant to appeal,—to the general reading public.”

From the beginning of Rosenbaum’s treatise, Greek and Roman men are exempt from blame for their boils and sores — illness always festers on the outskirts. “Only with the object of procreating offspring was the Greek husband to rest in the arms of his spouse”, he explains. Corruption came from the “slave-women” to whom husbands would courageously turn to “avoid greater evils”. Likewise, “the sexual excesses of the Roman were for the first 500 years on the whole insignificant”, yet as they came into greater contact with “foreign Peoples”, they began to adopt their “customs and vices”. The classical acceptance of pederasty was, in this argument, an import from the East, which appears, “as in the case with all sexual perversions, to owe its origin to the stimulation of the Asiatic climate, the mother of exuberance and voluptuousness”. Soon sex became more than a means to an end — or, as Rosenbaum writes, with his characteristic coupling of prudish assessment and curvacious syntax: “The facility with which the bestial instinct could be satisfied and the titillation of carnal pleasure procured, was bound to rob the customary manner of sexual indulgence of the charm of novelty, and to set the depraved imagination of the voluptuary at work to solve the problem of how to import manifold variations into the simple act of copulation”. And thus, disease spread along these fresh vectors of sensation.

The accounts that follow fill the modern reader with a newfound gratitude for penicillin. The chapter names alone are the stuff of scaremongering sex-ed lit: “morbid outgrowths on the genital organs”, “buboes”, “ulcers of the urethra”. We learn that the fellator and fellatrix as well as the fornicator and fornicatrix were prone to suffer from “ulcers of the throat”, “mouth-ache”, “tooth-ache”, and “generally pains of the palate”. Cunnilingus could lead to “shiny pustules” and “paralysis of the tongue”. There is a seemingly endless chapter on the “feminine disease” of the Scythians, said to have caused men to assume the roles of women, and which — according to Rosenbaum’s survey of critical commentary — was either caused by general vice, a penchant for onanism, hemorrhoids, menstruation, gonorrhea, the loss of the testicles, or mental illness. There are mechanical descriptions of the dysregulation of various orifices, which need no recapitulation here, and we learn, somewhat surprisingly, that the Greek verb for fellatio was lesbiazein — literally, “to do it like women from Lesbos”. In 1500, Rosenbaum tells us, Erasmus would make the mistake of publicly proclaiming that “the term remains, but I think the practice has been eliminated”. One of his interlocutors would diplomatically reply: “I fear this is not true: at any rate I am told this sort of practice is not entirely repugnant to the habits of some men even of our own day”.

It follows that the most racy aspect of the very scholarly Plague of Lust is neither the medical descriptions of infection (surprise) nor the normative historical revisionism, but Rosenbaum’s rousing forays in philology. Ancient Greek had specific terms for “the act of erecting the penis” and for the agent who “performs the work of causing an erection of the penis”; and the word for cunnilingus gets rendered as “a puppy”. A reader of Rosenbaum’s volume will be faced with numerous bracing translations, such as one attributed to Galen, who proclaims that “the drinking of sweat, urine and the menstrual blood of women is vicious and shameful, and not less so when a person, as Xenocrates proposes to do, smears the regions of the mouth and throat with excrement and swallows it down.” Not less so, indeed. There are laddish epithets, such as the one lent to Eunus from Syria, “glutton of the privy parts”, and lewd boasts that could slot seamlessly into queasy rap lyrics: “in the stews licking up the abominable dew”. We learn misogynistic pejoratives like “meriochane” (supposedly given to Cleopatra by detractors), which Rosenbaum translates as “the woman who gapes wide for ten thousand men”, and encounter encyclopedic lists of Greek nicknames for prostitutes, some of which are rendered in English as “common strumpets” and “ground-thumpers”.

This is all to say that, across more than 650 pages of erudite scholarship, there is nary a sentence devoted to safe, or even mutually joyous, sex. Nor any meaningful consideration of female sexuality in a form that is not refracted through the judgements of men. The “plague of lust” comes to seem less like a virus or bacteria than desire itself.