between a syphilitic ulcer and one caused by some other disease such as
osteomyelitis. They would therefore have treated it as they would have
treated a syphilitic lesion. Alternatively, the same treatment might simply
have been used for any ulcer on the leg regardless of cause. In any case,
the presence of the ulcer on Henry VIII's leg is not in dispute; only its
cause is debated. Of itself, the ulcer cannot prove that he ever had
syphilis. A final diagnosis could only be reached by disinterment and
medical testing of Henry's remains.
Regards
J.
From: ADRIANCHANNING@aol.com
To: GEN-MEDIEVAL-L@rootsweb.com
Subject: Re: FW: Henry VIII's monsters
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 11:04:56 EDT
In subsequent issues of the _Genealogists Magazine_ re Henry's venereal
disease:
In the September 1997 it was stated that "it is common knowledge" common
fallacy? "that, possibly in his teens, the King contracted venereal
disease,
which plagued him from the rest of his life. ... The standard treatment for
syphilis and the like in Tudor times, which is also in use today was the
application of nitrate of silver. It is a recorded fact that Henry VIII's
surgeons
treated him continually with this potion."
Even if this were true, this line of argument was largely nullified by a
Dr
Paul Fox in the March 1998 issue:
Henry could not have passed on congenital syphilis to all his issue "...a
man who is infected with syphilis remains infectious to his partner for
only
about two years. A woman can transmit the infection to her children for
about
four years after she has been infected...", so there must be another
reason
for the early deaths of most of his children.
Adrian
John P. wrote;
The links between disease, birth rate and survival are central to
genealogical understandings and the case of Henry VIII and his wives and
issue, since his marriages were central to the course of the English
Reformation, are among the best reported and most scrutinized of all. But
a
good deal of cant has been written about it.
A theory was put forward some years ago, in Retha Warnicke's biography of
Anne Boleyn, that the male fetus Anne miscarried in January 1536 was
deformed. Warnicke argues that since deformed children were thought to
result from incest or other sexual transgressions, Henry VIII got the idea
that Anne had committed incest, or at least that the deformed fetus was
used
to prove that she had committed incest w/her brother. There is however no
contemporary reference to a deformed fetus in January 1536, nor was such
an
argument used in the trials of Queen Anne or her brother. In fact a
report
from an Italian ambassador at the time says that Anne was only in the 4th
month of pregnancy when she miscarried, so while it may have been possible
to determine that it was male, only the grossest deformity would have been
visible--and again, no known source at the time mentions any such
deformity.
Warnicke's work has not met with general approval.
The theory that Henry VIII had venereal disease originated only in the
19th
century. It is known that Henry suffered for decades before his death
with
a venous ulcer on one leg. Such a lesion can be a sign of syphilis but
there can be many other causes as well. As Victorian historians were
always
ready to deal with scandal, however, it quickly became a byword that the
early deaths of many of Henry's children, including Edward VI, resulted
from
hereditary syphilis. Mary I's childlessness was also blamed on Henry's
supposed venereal disease.
We know that Henry suffered a bad leg injury in a tournament (not the fall
that supposedly led to Anne Boleyn's miscarriage in 1536). An equally
persuasive post-facto diagnosis is that he developed chronic osteomyelitis
after the broken leg and the ulcer resulted from that disease. Just
possibly, the long existence of such a chronic infection could have
lowered
his fertility levels, or ended them, explaining why he failed to
impregnate
the Katherines Howard & Parr. (The evidence seems quite overwhelming that
the marriage to Anne of Cleves was never consummated. It is also possible
that given Henry's age and extremely poor health by the time he married
Katherine Parr, that was only a marriage of companionship. Certainly
during
that marriage there was far less speculation about more children than
there
had been with Katherine Howard, though Katherine Parr as queen was in her
thirties, significantly older than her predecessor. On the other hand,
she
died in 1548 giving birth to a daughter by her last huband, Thomas
Seymour.)
One sidelight here is that despite her promiscuity, Katherine Howard never
became pregnant by any of the sexual partners she had in addition to Henry
VIII. Dereham and Culpeper were younger men and in good health, and
Katherine was in her teens and twenties. Was there any effective
contraceptive knowledge at that time, and did Katherine have access to it?
(Abstinence clearly does not apply here!)
Katharine of Aragon's gynaecological history recalls that of her mother,
Isabella the Catholic, who had several unsuccessful pregnancies in
addition
to those that ended with live births. Ives' book proves that Anne Boleyn
also suffered a miscarriage in August 1534, less than a year after
Elizabeth
I was born. There were probably many more such medieval family tragedies
that escaped notice in our records, so Katharine and Anne aren't
necessarily
unique in that sense.
Regards
John P.