Hitler, Shakespeare, Al Capone, Friedrich Nietzsche, Van Gough, Toulouse Lautrec, Gauguin, Manet, Baudelaire – slutty syphilitics, the lot of them. Pretty trendy disease, huh? Which is why a lot of you people on this website will no doubt be interested in it.

We all know that Hitler was a raving mad man, but this diagnosis may have contributed to his lunatic behaviour. Syphilis has three stages; in its late stage, the virus can attack your neurological system and cause insanity. It also affects your sensitivity to light and damages your spinal cord. Basically, you become a squinting, hobbling lunatic.

Syphilis was spread globally by sailors from the 13th century onwards, and became basically a xenophobic disease until an Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro concreted the name in 1530. Prior to this, all nations were pointing fingers all over the place. It was called the “French disease” in Italy and Germany; in France it was known as the “Italian disease”; the Dutch blamed the Spanish; the Tahitians blamed the British and the Turks blamed Fracastoro.

But anyone would blame Fracastoro if you woke up after a blurry one-night stand to find huge soars and pustules where he had been tending to you. And Franc wouldn’t have even known about it, as syphilis is also named the “great imitator”, one of the most difficult sexually transmitted diseases to pin down.

“I felt pass over me the wind of the wings of madness,” Baudelaire wrote in 1862. But basically it’s gross. Anyway, Ian Kelly is holding a lecture on 8 December with The Last Tuesday Society and we couldn’t think of anything more ridiculous than getting you lot to compete to listen to a guy who’s in Harry Potter talk about sores on your cock, so email in something crass and we might give you two free tickets.

AQUILA DUNFORD WOOD