• Herpes
• homosexuality
• sexual experience
• sexual health
• social science

There is a lot of material dealing with herpes as a subject within the journal. However, most of it consists of papers dealing with the clinical aspects as opposed to the social side of the disease, reflected in the relatively small amount of sources addressing its stigmatisation.

Herpes was first mentioned in the journal in 1963.1 In 1966, the first diagnosis of the disease was described by the Roman physician Herodotus, who noted ‘the herpetic eruptions which appeared about the mouth at the crisis of simple fevers, and the weals of febrile urticaria’.2 The first classic definition of genital herpes, recorded in France in 1736, was also referred to, already asserting that it occurred in both men and women: 'These disorders are not proper to men alone, but (mutatis mutandis) are common to women from the same cause'.2 The article relates this to the fact that in the 18th and 19th centuries, the professors writing about herpes were more likely to see female patients. It also points out that the foremost authorities on herpes in the 18th and 19th centuries were French and German, rather than British.

1968 saw the continuation of this theme of the history of genital herpes.3 In 1982, the effect of sex, age, or social class was shown to create ‘no important differences between recurrence rates’4 confirming that herpes, as opposed to syphilis, had similar effects across the board. However, an article from 1983 in The Times showed that stigma was still prevalent among some of the population: ‘Today there is AIDS for practicing gays; and for promiscuous heterosexuals there is herpes. In 1966 we had to make do with infectious mononucleosis, alias “the kissing disease”’.5

In 1985 it was recorded that herpes diagnoses were in fact going up, but this could be accounted for due to poor data: ‘the reporting system, however, does not differentiate between primary and recurrent infections, and consequently any increase in the number of patients re-attending clinics with recurrent genital herpes would falsely inflate the statistics’.6 Burroughs Wellcome discovered a cure for herpes, acyclovir, in 1974. Overall, in terms of writing within the journal, it would seem that herpes attracted the least stigma. However, this is partly due to the lack of sources within the journal taking a social perspective on the disease.