The Story of Herpes Through the Ages - Lena H Brennand & Cat Irving - Zoom

Plagues of Passion: A History of Herpes, Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, Hepatitis & HIV — A 6- Part Lecture Series Exploring the Dark Intimacies of Disease

Lecture Two - Pox and Prejudice: The Story of Herpes Through the Ages

From the physicians of ancient Greece to the virologists of the 21st century, herpes has fascinated, frustrated, and stigmatised in equal measure. In this second lecture, we unravel the complex story of the herpes simplex viruses—agents of an infection so old that it is woven into the DNA of human civilisation itself. We will examine its earliest written descriptions by Hippocrates, its curious role in Renaissance court scandals, the myths and moral panics it sparked in the 20th century, and the scientific breakthroughs that reshaped both treatment and public perception.

Through an interdisciplinary lens—combining medical history, epidemiology, and cultural analysis—we will explore how herpes has been portrayed in art, law, literature, and the media, and why its social stigma endures despite its ubiquity. This is the story of a virus that is both commonplace and culturally charged, told with the precision of history and the intrigue of human drama.

Speaker Bio

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience, Lena's New Book - Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

Speaker Bio:

Cat Irving has been the Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall since 2015 and has been caring for anatomical and pathological museum collections for over twenty years. After a degree in Anatomical Science she began removing brains and sewing up bodies at the Edinburgh City Mortuary. Following training in the care of wet tissue collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England she worked with the preparations of William Hunter at the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University, where she is now Consultant Human Remains Conservator. Cat is a licensed anatomist, and gives regular talks on anatomy and medical history. She recently carried out conservation work on the skeleton of serial killer William Burke

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