Prostitutes and syphilis, in games, Just watched Jonah Hex last night... Options

[Wounded Ronin]

So, I'd missed Jonah Hex in the movies, but watched it on DVD yesterday. Even though Megan Fox was playing the prostitute, every time someone went into her room I thought, "Eww, gross!", because as far as prostitutes that I know are concerned, they're all sort of gross.

Then I got to thinking about how you'd protray veneral disease in a historical setting like that. The thing that many people don't seem to realize about veneral disease is that it's often, especially in women, asymptomatic. That means that in the days before microscopy and PCRs and stuff like that, and certainly before germ theory, probably there were lots of people running around with veneral disease who did not know, and who had no way of knowing at the time, that they were sick and/or contagious. Pre germ theory, you could spend all day looking at someone's genitals at high noon with a magnifying glass, and you'd literally have no way of knowing for sure, or even conceptualizing realistically, whether or not a biohazard was contained therein. And before you had the ability to do lab work on samples, most people probably assumed that if something looked totally normal that it was free of disease. Think that as recently as in Victorian times you wouldn't strictly speaking be able to tell if someone's genitals were safe or not. Even today, come to think of it, many tests for infectious disease have a window period of around 3 months at least.

Syphilis is of particular note because there was a historical epidemic of syphilis in Western Europe in the 1500s, and also because in the context of a role playing game syphilis would be the most complicated to portray in a character and could also be part of character development, if it eventually causes neurological problems. As an example, my understanding is that Nietzche got syphilis and his neurological damage explained how his writings became stranger and stranger towards the end of his life.

If someone wanted to run some kind of prostitute character in a Western setting, that character could have syphillis but be asymptomatic and not know it. As the campaign progressed, the character could start to develop dementia and deformity. For someone who is interested in character progression and storytelling, that could be a really interesting character to portray.

Anyway, here's the wikipedia article on syphilis; it's pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphillis