Genital Herpes in the Global Period has been a time of understanding. Read below about what was going on in the period 1870s to today. The study of Genital Herpes in the Global Period By the 1870s, when a major syphilis epidemic emerged, it had become of vital importance to know how to distinguish the [...]

Herpes in the European Period was an intermediate time – the ‘discovery’ of herpes was over, but the ‘understanding’ of herpes was still many centuries away. So what comes between ‘discovery’ and ‘understanding’? In the case of genital herpes, it was ‘description’. Read below about how doctors and scientists went about ‘describing’ herpes in the [...]

Herpes in the Roman Period was a time of discovery. Because what seemed to be a new condition was spreading across the Empire. Roman lips were cracking open into blisters that would heal, but then emerge again a few weeks or months later. Eventually this new condition would come to be called herpes – the [...]

What do we know about genital herpes in history? When did it start to show up in the Western world and when did doctors and scientists start to recognise and treat it? These were some of the questions I wanted to have answers for. Below you’ll see what I found out. The Roman Period When [...]