‘Olivia Weisser’s succinct, brilliant history of the pox centers venereal disease as a key component of life in early modern London and a new pathway through which to understand many aspects of big city life. What often seems secret to us was a mundane reality to Londoners. Weisser provocatively argues that the pox was a leading edge of modern disease patterns. In lively prose, she explores the world of the pox from the perspective of ordinary people managing and shaping the experience of infection and its stigma in ways that were both close to home and embedded in the expanding global imperial marketplace.’ Julie Hardwick, author of Sex in an Old Regime City: young workers and intimacy in France, 1660–1789

‘Uncurable, but infinitely treatable, in 18th-century London venereal disease changed lives. The Dreaded Pox interrogates a hidden world of home remedies, quack nostrums and sexual violence, unearthing the experience of individual sufferers. It will be necessary reading for social historians of all stamps.’ Tim Hitchcock, co-author of London Lives: Poverty Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800

‘Weisser takes us on a compelling tour of the world of venereal disease in 18th century London. From streets to coffeehouses to courtrooms, we discover ordinary women and men’s encounters with a dreaded disease, and their ingenious remedies for it, marketed through handbills, or scribbled in recipe books. Between the lines of the archive, she uncovers the informal, pragmatic routes that servants, wives, and respectable men took to manage an intractable set of symptoms. Women are powerful agents in this story, selling remedies, fighting disease, and even using the evidence of infection to convict their own husbands of sexual misconduct. Full of rich evidence and revealing stories, Weisser’s book reconstructs the havoc the pox wreaked, and the strategies women and men deployed to survive.’ Laura Gowing, author of Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London