Coleridge, Nitric Acid and the Spectre of Syphilis

Abstract

On 18 May 1832, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote to J.H. Green informing him that his older brother, Colonel James Coleridge, attempted to call on him in the morning, but that he ‘would not expose him to the fatigue of getting out of his Carriage, & climbing 5 flights of Stairs, in order to behold a Mask of Syphilis’. The various interpretations of Coleridge’s late health prompted by his letter rely on this not being a reference to the horrors of tertiary syphilis. Alan Bewell has suggested Coleridge was suffering from a bout of cholera; G.S. Rousseau and D.B. Haycock believe it was part and parcel of the debilitating effects of opium withdrawal. However, what Coleridge entertains with the phrase ‘Mask of Syphilis’ is, at the very least, a psychological preoccupation with venereal disease at that moment, real or imagined. This article returns to Coleridge’s youth to provide the pathological history for his confessed anxieties in 1832. It establishes that Coleridge was concerned he may already have contracted syphilis by the winter of 1800–1801 and that Humphry Davy agreed it was plausible. Exploring the significance of the symptoms from which Coleridge thought he was suffering, together with the painful curative path he pursued according to the best medical knowledge of the period, this analysis demonstrates that Coleridge’s remedial requests were indicative of his and Davy’s diagnosis of syphilis, accurate or precautionary. Since diagnostic practices are as historically situated as actual symptoms, I have at all times endeavoured to adhere to the methodology outlined by Rousseau and Haycock, who: