The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History

The Hidden Affliction is an interdisciplinary collection that explores the history of sexually transmitted infections (particularly gonorrhea and syphilis); most of its articles also link these diseases to issues of demographics and infertility. The collection is impressive in disciplinary and chronological scope, including work by historians, demographers, archaeobiologists, and virologists. It is divided into four sections—pre-modern sexually transmitted infections (sti), scientific approaches, and demography in the “Global South” and modern Europe. Although each of the articles stands alone, the overall editorial structure makes this collection into a cohesive unit that is worth reading as a whole book. Szerter’s introduction provides valuable insights about the topic and the importance of interdisciplinary work in the history of medicine more broadly. He argues that in order to obtain valuable knowledge about the ways in which venereal diseases led to historical infertility, we need not only to familiarize ourselves with the cultural...