Cupid's disease

• Cupid's Disease

Cupid's disease (uncountable)

1. (dated, euphemistic) Syphilis.
   • 1985, Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales‎:

     "Yes, Cupid's Disease—syphilis, you know. I was in a brother in Salonika, nearly seventy years ago. I caught syphilis—lots of the girls had it—we called it Cupid's Disease. My husband saved me, took me out, had it treated. That was years before penicillin, of course. Could it have caught up with me after all these years?"

   • 2006 May 10, Elixirbet, “how many STDs are there?”, in soc.sexuality.general‎ (Usenet), retrieved 2022-04-22:

     Post-syphilic syndrome is reputedly rather fun. You get to experience lots of luscious sexy sensations. That's why it's called Cupid's Disease.

   • 2010, Ralph Keyes, Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms‎:

     As the word "syphilis" took on the taint of the malady, however, vaguer tems such as special disease, social disease, secret disease, vice disease, Cupid's disease, a certain disease, blood disease, and blood poison emerged.

   • 2017, Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women‎:

     It wasn't Cupid's disease, as the gossipmongers charged. It was radium.

   • 2017, Thomas P. Habif, M. Shane Chapman, James G. H. Dinulos, Kathryn A. Zug, Skin Disease: Diagnosis and Treatment‎:

     In the past, syphilis was called the French disease but was also known as the Christian disease, the Great Pox, Cupid's disease, and the Black Lion; it was most well-known as lues, lues venereal, or venereal plague.

   • 2018, Susanna de Vries, To the Ends of the Earth: Mary Gaunt, Pioneer Traveller‎:

     Given the horror with which 'Cupid's disease' was regarded in 1900 Mary must have told as few people as possible of the real cause of her husband's decline into insanity.

   • 2020, John Fox Bershof, MD, The First History of Man‎:

     Other names for syphilis were the "Spanish disease," with a similar story to its French counterpart, and "Cupid's disease," which really needs no explanation, as well as other descriptives.