Review: "The Dreaded Pox" by Olivia Weisser

The Dreaded Pox by Olivia Weisser
Published February 2026 via Cambridge University Press
★★★★

Slip back a few hundred years and catch a carriage (maybe after a ship?) to London, and maybe you have an idea of what you could expect—or maybe not. And probably the pox doesn't factor into those calculations, but it should...because if The Dreaded Pox is anything to go by, the pox was everywhere.

In London of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, "the pox" was something of a catch-all diagnosis for just about everything that we now know as sexually transmitted infections, and there was a thriving economy built around the pox: potions and pills and recipes and, ah, rather more disturbing cures.

Weisser doesn't get into what those cures actually did. I'm guessing that in most cases the answer was "nothing good" (honestly, the book made me wonder just how humanity has survived this long; I will spare you the description of some of the side effects of mercury treatments, but...), but the point is more how the pox, and pox treatments, came into play socially: how society understood the pox and how it was transmitted; who was considered suspect or blameable (hint: racism, sexism, and classism, plus general xenophobia, were major players); how the pox factored into certain types of trials; how it could tell a story that people sometimes socially could not.

And yet, midwives did not wield the same authority in court as medical men. The very subject of midwives' expertise – women's bodies – paradoxically made their knowledge suspect. (loc. 2303*)

The actual text of the book is short—some 40% is notes—but it makes for an engaging read and an unusual lens into history. Somewhat academic but very accessible for the lay reader. I'm not sure, after all this, just how much brain space the pox took up in the average Londoner's mind or how likely one was to end up with said pox (or, for that matter, what the scene was like in smaller places), but I loved the comparisons Weisser draws to more modern ailments. How far we've come, and yet how little some things have changed.

One for those who like those corners of history that are often left to gather dust in the corner, and also for those interested in medical curiosities of both the then and the now.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.