Review by Joseph Darlington of: The No-Nose Club: Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination by Noelle Gallagher. Yale University Press, 2018. £55. ISBN 9 7803 0021 7056
The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 48, Issue 4, December 2019, Pages 388–392,
"Comparison can be made here to Tim Clayton’s recent study, This Dark Business, and the mobilisation of British journalism and satire against Napoleon and the Jacobin–Republican project. To Clayton’s reading of prints from Gillray and Isaac Cruickshank which focus on the depiction of Frenchmen as diminutive in stature, wild with ideology, and starving thin, Gallagher’s study adds a complementary unpacking of pockmarks, suspect beauty spots, upside-down pistols, hidden pillboxes, and other encoded references to sexual infection. Gillray’s The French Generals Retiring on Account of their Health (1799) appears in both studies and mocks Napoleon’s withdrawal from Egypt by showing his generals in a quack’s office. ‘The ‘French disease’ of military ambition is figured as an ailment shared by all the leaders of unsuccessful French military campaigns in Asia and Africa’ (p. 137), Gallagher writes, with revolutionary leader Revellière-Lépeaux handing out medicines from a ‘directorial dispensary’ (p. 137) reminiscent of a venereal specialist’s office."