Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

206 Forbidden Words
St Margaret of Antioch was the patron saint of women in labour. St Luke and
St Michael were called upon for a variety of illnesses. In all, some 130 saints
were invoked to serve as protectors and comforters of the sick and medically
distressed.
If ever a euphemistic practice backfired, it was this use of saints’ names.
The diseases became so associated with the names of the saints that the saints
themselves came to be seen, not as comforters and protectors of the faithful,
but rather as wrathful tyrants to be feared as perpetrators of contagion. In the
minds of sufferers of herpes zoster, it was now St Antonius who was stoking
up the fires in their burning blisters. Much to the horror of the church, this
change in perspective inspired a dramatic return to pagan worship. The cult of
saints was consequently tabooed by the church, and the practice largely
disappeared. It is a striking illustration of the pejorative path that euphemism
often takes.
The most dreaded of diseases typically went by a number of different
labels, as people struggled to find ever sweeter-sounding words for them.
Syphilis is a notable example; although syphilographers disagree as to when
the disease first appeared, by the late 1400s it was endemic, and dreaded with
good reason. Joseph Gruenpeck (1473–1552), a sufferer, describes it thus:
I have seen scourges, horrible sicknesses and many infirmities affect mankind from all
corners of the earth. Amongst them has crept in, from the western shores of Gaul, a
disease which is so cruel, so distressing, so appalling that until now nothing so
horrifying, nothing more terrible or disgusting, has ever been known on this earth.
(Cited in Porter 1997: 166)
It was not only on account of its mortality rate that syphilis was so feared;
there were many diseases just as deadly. What was most shocking were its
immoral sexual origins: the moral depravation that was believed to cause it
was made obvious in the physical symptoms of the disease. Beginning with
sores in the genital area and progressing rapidly to a general rash, the
syphilitic pustules, if not checked, eventually eat into the bone and destroy
the nose, lips and genitals.
The taboos surrounding syphilis were so severe that it masqueraded under
dozens of names. None of the countries in which the disease raged would
admit to being its place of origin, each blaming it on the deviance of
foreigners. In sixteenth-century English, it was known as Spanish needle,
Spanish pox, Spanish pip and Spanish gout, reflecting Spain’s status as
number one enemy of the day. (Seventeenth-century scabbado is a mock-
Hispanic version of English scab.) These labels were later replaced by the
disease of Naples and Naples canker – Shakespeare referred to the disease as
‘Neapolitan bone-ache’. 3 Next, it was the French who featured most prominently
in xenophobic epithets for syphilis. In the eighteenth century, the most