Death by Social Disease: Pills of White Mercury

Before I start in on this week's post,  I'd like to give a shout to another group who does real justice to a classic Dead Lover ballad!.  Valentine Wolfe has just released this most excellent version of "I Am Stretched On Your Grave." I've been fortunate enough to perform at a lot of the same events as these two, and they're both great musicians and lovely people. 

As you may recall, I mentioned this song in my post about "The Unquiet Grave." VW's version is very reminiscent of the Dead Can Dance rendition of the song, and is well worth a listen. 

OK, now that you've enjoyed something haunting and beautiful, let's talk about syphilis!

Syphilis, as we know it today is a serious but easily treatable disease in the developed world, and is, of course, spread largely through sexual contact. When it first appeared in Europe sometime in the 15th Century though, it was much more virulent and nearly impossible to treat. Eventually by the time this week's song started to appear in the 18th Century as "The Unfortunate Rake (Roud 2), physicians had been having some luck treating it with "White Mercury" (mercury chloride), leading to the title of this Scottish variant known as "Pills of White Mercury." 

The downsides of treating anything with mercury is that while it will kill off the bacteria causing the disease, there's a very, very good chance that it might kill the patient as well. At the very least, these chemicals had some pretty severe side effects which were often confused or closely associated with the effects of the disease. And the mercury treatment was most effective in the early stages, when the infection was pretty localized (it involves open sores in sensitive spots, do yourself a favor and do NOT go looking for images of it) and the patient otherwise healthy. Hence the "had she but told me of it in time." 

Penicillin is awesome. 

The song has many variants, and several different melodies, but one of things that ties them all together - and sets them apart from other Dead Lover songs - is the frankness with which it treats its subject matter. Not only is it addressing the issue of sexually transmitted disease, but it's pretty honest about how gross the lingering death caused by some of those diseases could be ("give each of them a bunch of red roses/so when I pass by ye won't know the smell"). 

I think it's that very frankness that has made the song so popular over the years. It's a bit transgressive to talk openly about sleeping around, which of course makes it memorable and interesting (just think about all the folk songs about drinking and fighting, bad behavior makes good entertainment). It can also be viewed as a bit of a cautionary tale, "don't be like me, or you'll meet a sorry end rotting away in a hospital," or as an old saying went, warning about casual sex in the pre-antibiotic days, "a night with Venus leads to a lifetime with Mercury." On the other hand, it's made pretty clear that if the young man's partner had let him know that she'd picked up a souvenir of her own dalliances, things probably would have been OK, so the moral may actually be "please consult a reliable physician if you think you may be ill or suddenly develop open sores on your private parts dear lord what is wrong with you people?"

In fact, this song is nearly a parody of some of the more sentimental "dying of disease" ballads that populate other corners of the Dead Lovers world. Usually the disease in question is some "ladylike" disease such as consumption (tuberculosis) that leaves the sufferer romantically pale and faint, but doesn't have the nasty outward manifestation that something like syphilis does. Plus these diseases don't require any intimate contact, leaving the image of the sufferer as fragile, innocent and virginal as they're carried off to heaven like they angel their lover knows them to be. Syphilis, by contrast, is pretty gross and was associated with loose morals and casual sex (or outright prostitution). 

So "good" lovers pine away and die without ever doing more than innocently touching hands, "bad" lovers die an uglier death, but the bawdy song tradition says, "hey, at least they got to have a little fun first." 

Interestingly, in the American West, this song evolved in a totally different direction (well, not totally, the dude still dies). It became a cowboy ballad called, among other things, Streets of Laredo (Roud 223650), and tells the story of a young man dying not of disease, but of a gunshot wound. Now, cowboys were not known for being particularly prudish, and sexually transmitted diseases were absolutely an issue reported among prostitutes and their patrons in the frontier towns of the Wild West (though by the early 1900s, reliable treatments that were less likely to kill the patient than to cure them were becoming available), so I suspect that the change was less due to concern about the salacious nature of the original and more due to a desire to "freshen up" an old favorite, and to make it fit into the gunslinger mythos which was popular at the time. At the same time, it's still a cautionary tale of bad behavior, as the young victim acknowledges he's "done wrong" and fell into wicked ways which led to his demise. 

Now, I don't know if "Pills of White Mercury" will make it onto the final Dead Lovers recording, not because I'm squeamish about the subject matter, but because I've recorded a good version of it already with Baroque & Hungry! Still, it's a staple of my live shows and has just enough gory detail to make it fun.