SOURCE: "Plague, Physician, Writer, and the Poison Damsel," in To Blight with Plague: Studies in a Literary Theme, New York University Press, 1992, pp. 157-83.

In the following excerpt, Leavy analyzes literary works that closely associate women with disease.

When Fournier published his book on Syphilis and Marriage in 1880, he had several purposes. Like his other treatises on venereal disease, this one provided medical education. The important discoveries concerning the diagnosis and treatment of syphilis were yet to occur, and Fournier's careful look at and classification of symptoms and patterns of transmission—many of his conclusions arrived at deductively—were being communicated to physicians who would encounter and attempt to treat the disease. The book could also educate that segment of the general public that would read it, ironically the same group that he was depicting as more dangerous in the spread of the disease than it as a...