The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- 'Repeated Doses of a Normal Penis' -- (Chapter VIII, Part 24)

Likewise, most nineteenth-century 'hysterics' were probably suffering from ailments we now know as epilepsy, closed-head injuries, Tourette's syndrome, multiple sclerosis and even syphilis.

In treating his own father for the latter, Charcot suspended him by the neck to 'lengthen' his nerves.

Unfortunately, being hanged also hastened the old man's demise.

Presumably, Charcot's cure for a young woman was far more pleasurable: Freud confessed himself dumbfounded when he heard his mentor declare that the woman's nervousness was due to her husband's poor sexual prowess.

'In cases like this, it's always the genital thing,' he exclaimed. 'Always, always, always.'

In other words: All she needs is a good seeing to.

Likewise, another colleague of Freud's prescribed the following for high-strung women—

'Penis normalis dosim repetatur'

or 

'Repeated doses of a normal penis.' 

Back in Vienna, Freud struck up a long-distance friendship with a younger colleague in Berlin named Wilhelm Fliess.

The two had the sort of intense, platonic bond that men had enjoyed for centuries; ironically, though, it's largely because of the sexed-up theories Freud formulated in his correspondence with Fliess that society now tends to view close male friendships with suspicion.

Freud would tell Fliess how he 'panted' for their next 'congress,' and Wilhelm soon became a sounding board and mentor, with Sigmund waiting on his pronouncements 'as on the Messiah.'

Sadly for the rest of us, Fliess was even more deluded than Freud.

Eager to make his mark, he invented a new disease—the 'nasal reflex neurosis'—as well as its cure: regular applications of cocaine to the nostrils.

What's more, Fliess claimed the inside of the nose contained 'genital spots' that were hardwired to people's privates—especially women's—creating scope for sexual positions that even The Kama Sutra didn't envisage.

Sure enough, like Freud, Fliess found that coke could cure pretty much whatever ailed you—or at least make you feel like it did—especially if you stuffed it up your nose.

Imagine what Fliess would've made of this:
Thomas Wedders, an 18th century Yorkshireman,
had the longest nose in history: 7 inches (19 cm),
according to Ripley's Believe It Or Not in London
(The Daily Telegraph)

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- The Original Mistress-Slave Relationship -- (Chapter VIII, Part 7)

Being slapped around entertained him for a bit, but Sacher-Masoch eventually tired of the doctor's wife, deeming her too common to be a despotic sultana or tsarina.

So he started trying to offload her onto some other sod, thinking the jealousy might spice up their adultery.

Sacher-Masoch had shown Anna a draft of what would be his most famous work—Venus in Furs—but she never really got what he wanted.

What she did get, though, was syphilis from a 'Polish Count' who'd been encouraged by Sacher-Masoch to seduce her.

Even worse, the 'Count' turned out to be an impostor, and when Anna tearfully confessed her infidelity—and contagious disease—to Sacher-Masoch, he pretended to be offended… and neatly cut her dead in the process.

THE FANNY OF HIS DREAMS

Leopold then flirted with a manly Baroness from Munich who turned out to be a lesbian before he finally found the Fanny of his dreams.

Or, to be precise, Fanny found him.

In 1869, Sacher-Masoch received a fan letter from a would-be authoress who signed herself as 'Baroness Bogdanoff' but in reality was just plain ol' Fanny Pistor.

Nevertheless, they soon embarked on the original Mistress-Slave relationship, complete with a six-month written contract giving her the right to punish 'Gregor' at will.

In return, she promised to wear furs as often as possible: 'especially when she is in a cruel mood.'

Sacher-Masoch and Fanny: Mistress and Slave

Mistress and Slave immediately left boring old Graz to live out their fantasies in Venice, where Sacher-Masoch encouraged Fanny to have an affair with an Italian actor he insisted on calling 'the Greek' (because it sounded more exotic).

That year, the writer also published Venus in Furs, basing the title on his nickname for a painting by Titian (which is actually called Venus with a Mirror).

As with the Venus of Urbino, Sacher-Masoch's fixation features a hefty goddess in the buff, but Titian painted her dripping in jewels and fur.

The saucy detail is in the trim: her fur cloak cunningly overlays her mons veneris.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- The Clit Writ Large -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 23)

Believe it or not, it wasn't until the nineteenth century that physicians finally managed to distinguish gonorrhea from syphilis, and neither disease was definitively cured until the discovery of antibiotics.

As for telegony, homunculi, and other misconceptions, scientists weren't able to prove that sperm-and-egg fusion caused fertilization until the late 1800s—and even then just in starfish.

It's only in the last half century or so that we've actually been able to witness the moment of human conception.

As for the clitoris, well, if this sounds familiar to women, I apologize: every time we men think we've found it, we end up losing it again.

The clit has been popping in and out of male consciousness ever since its rediscovery during the Renaissance.

Columbus' lyrical moniker was apparently too much of a mouthful, so an anatomist in nineteenth century Vienna circulated something catchier, based on a Greek word—kleitoriazein—meaning 'to titillate.'

FREUD VS. FEMINISM

Ironically, the man who did the most to bury the clitoris after that was another Viennese doctor who set himself up as an authority on sex.

Freud dismissed clitoral orgasms as immature and bordering on the perverse.

It wasn't until the feminist backlash of the 1960s that women began to reclaim their bits, so to speak, and now there's no getting away from them.

Amid a slew of neologisms ('clitmaster,' 'cliterature,' etcetera), the clit's writ large in modern culture, arguably bigger than ever before.

In fact, it's hard to imagine it ever being 'lost' again.

Then again, if history is anything to go by…

* * *

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Syphilis and Biology Gone Bad -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 22)

The surgeon to Pope Julius II (possibly the first syphilitic pontiff) worked out that mercury ointment helped, though he also advocated fumigation: encasing the victim in a box and lighting a fire underneath to vaporize the liquid metal—a 'cure' that could very well kill the patient.

Nevertheless, quicksilver soon became the treatment of choice, inspiring the pun that 'a night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury'—even if you didn't have syphilis.

One of the most tragic mistakes in the history of medicine involved the misdiagnosis of gonorrhea as an early form of syphilis: doctors mistook the clap for the pox, ditching old treatments that worked on gonorrhea to switch to mercury, which didn't.

Gonorrhea rates skyrocketed, sterilizing women and blinding babies.

Meanwhile, mercury wasn't a sure-fire cure for syphilitics, either.

Manet, the painter of Olympia, was one of countless whoremongers who succumbed to syphilis over the centuries, along with the many wives who caught it from their partners and passed it on to their congenitally deformed children.

THE 'FACE' OF SYPHILIS

A truly epic disease, syphilis manifested itself across generations in three stages, starting with malevolent-looking sores that didn't bleed or hurt but were highly contagious, followed by an equally infectious rash weeks later, headaches, fever and hair loss.

After months and even years of latency, truly unfortunate victims would enter the final phase, typified by tumor-like lesions on the skin and bones, heart problems, seizures and dementia.

Oh, and their noses would collapse.

After all that, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the conclusion of my trip is a bit of a letdown.

It's probably wrong of me, but I've been expecting to see life-sized examples of biology gone bad: in short, I want to see the 'face' of syphilis.

What I find are four small, apocalyptic tableaux by a Sicilian who lived in the late 1600s, roughly a century before the other waxworks in La Specola were created.

Judging from his surviving works—all of which are in this room—Gaetano Zumbo must have been more than a tad morbid.

The Plague, The Triumph of Time, The Corruption of the Body, and The French Disease are all miniature vignettes of suffering, featuring piles of gangrenous corpses, diseased men and women grieving over loved ones, and the odd baby trying to suckle at its dead mother's breast.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- The World's First Sex Plague (Chap. IV, Pt. 21)

Far more importantly, La Specola's collection taught generations of doctors how to save lives.

And it's awe-inspiring that such fragile artworks—made of wax!—have survived for more than 200 years.

One mannequin—known as 'The Doll'—can be taken apart layer by layer to reveal the embryo in utero.

In fact, the sequence showing the development of the embryo is one of the few mistakes in the whole collection: it was based on an ancient theory of baby-making—the idea that sperm contained an itty-bitty perfectly formed human being called a homunculus (or 'little man') that just needed incubation to grow into a baby.

But my main destination is the museum's last room.

Lest you think me a total goremonger, let me explain: one of the ironies of the Renaissance is that the rediscovery of the human body coincided with its ruination, courtesy of the world's first sex plague.

To me, syphilis is all the stranger because my ignorance of it is surpassed only by the devastation it caused.

The first 'venereal disease'—the morbus venereus, or 'sickness of Venus'—seems to have been similar to AIDS but arguably worse because it affected far more people at a time when medicine was still locked in the Middle Ages.

Doctors have been debating how syphilis got started pretty much since its discovery.

No one knows whether the vicious spirochetes were already lurking in the New World or Columbus and his crew introduced them during their raping and pillaging.

As the disease mutated into a decimator of men, though, people tended to name it after their enemies with amusing consistency.

As an early sexologist put it, civilization spread 'syphilization.'

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- 'Good Luck With the Syphilis!' -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 19)

The current best guess by academics is that the Duke of Urbino had his mother buy the painting to help stoke the passions of his fourteen-year-old bride.

And what makes Urbino's Venus truly erotic is her 'attitude' in the modern sense of the term.

Titian's Venetian mentor had also dared to depict Venus with her hand betwixt her legs.

But in that earlier work, the naked goddess appeared to be sleeping.

Giorgione's Venus

When Titian copied the pose, he painted his Venus with her eyes wide open, giving the viewer 'bedroom eyes.'

In Twain's own time, the painter Manet had shocked tout le monde by borrowing Titian's Venus and recasting her as Olympia: a courtesan lying naked in heels, staring dead-eyed at the spectator with her hand clamped firmly over her moneymaker.

Manet's Olympia

And from the Renaissance love goddess to the high-class French hooker, it's just a short slide down the culture curve to the lowbrow porn of today, when women masturbating into the camera are never more than a few clicks away.

Rather than buying a masterpiece, today's urban Urbinos can gift their partners a DVD starring a woman called Venus in She Squirts #4!

But what I've really come to see are the consequences of all this venereal veneration.

If Venice is Italy's tourist stop for the Age of Decadence, then Florence represents the 'respectable' Renaissance, with more art than space to display it.

In a café, Lena and I meet a nice American couple who've come over to visit their daughter during her semester abroad.

The three of them are dutifully huddled over their guidebooks, planning how to beat the queues at all the must-see museums, when they ask us where we're headed.

'He wants to see some sculptures of syphilis,' Lena tells them.

Cue three quizzical looks—four, if you count my treacherous companion.

I try to explain, but not very convincingly, since I don't know what to expect myself. Every time I've mentioned it to a Florentine or a foreigner, I get the same reaction: you want to go where?

From what I've read, La Specola—part of the Natural History Museum—houses the world's biggest collection of anatomical wax models, including teaching specimens for nasty Olde Worlde diseases like syphilis.

When Napoleon visited, he was so impressed he ordered a complete set of duplicates for doctors in Paris to save them the trouble of experimenting on criminals.

'Soooo—the syphilis! Good luck with that!' the mother says brightly, before shooting Lena a sympathetic look.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Gays, Slave Nuns and 'The Bridge of Tits' -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 15)

Later Englishmen also protested that the 'whole (of Venice) may well be termed the brothel house of Europe.'

And with publicity like that, Venice soon became a must-see on the Grand Tour, that Continental odyssey intended to turn young aristos into men of culture.

In what seems unimaginable now, philosophers like Adam Smith, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes served as tutors on the Grand Tour to try to impart some knowledge to Britain's heirs, while keeping their whoring to a minimum: a bad case of 'the Venetian disease'—syphilis—could kill off a dynasty.

Two-thirds of Venetian dandies were unmarried, and the city fathers supposedly tried to woo young men back to heterosexuality by allowing prostitutes to bare their breasts on Il Ponte delle Tete—The Bridge of Tits.

Meanwhile, the daughters of aristocratic families were banged up in convents where they were more promiscuous than pious: the well-to-do had their own 'slave nuns' to do their praying and penance for them.

So I suppose it's understandable that most modern Carnival balls focus on the city's decline rather than its ascendancy.

But I can't help but think that the real reason has to do with their target market.

The powdered wigs and taffeta gowns of the Age of Decadence tend to appeal to women far more than the prim caps and high collars of the 1500s.

If we men were the decisionmakers, I reckon most of us would have plumped for the Age of the Codpiece.

When I've mentioned to locals that we're going to a ball, the reaction has been a mix of curiosity, disdain and pity, a gaze that I think can be summed up in one word: Sucker.

On the flight over, Lena got talking to a Venetian girl on the plane who was wrestling a papier-mâché claw from the overhead luggage compartment.

'There are two carnivals,' she said. 'The street parties are the real Carnival where you'll meet real Venetians. If you go to the organized Carnival parties, all you'll meet is a bunch of Americans.'

Considering that I'd already committed myself to forking out hundreds of pounds for the privilege, this wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear.

And who was this girl anyway? She was going to walk around as a giant lobster.