23. A Guilty Habit
Every now and then, James Boswell felt bad about his bad habit. However, he couldn’t help himself, and kept coming back. As he wrote in his diary entry of May 10th, 1763: ” At the bottom of the Hay-market I picked up a strong jolly young damsel, and taking her under the Arm I conducted her to Westminster-Bridge, and then in armour compleat did I engage her upon this noble Edifice. The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling below us amused me much. Yet after the brutish appetite was sated I could not but despise myself for being so closely united with such a low Wretch.”
The “Armour”, which Boswell also referred to in his diary as a “cundum”, was supposed to protect against venereal disease, but proved ineffective. The fact that his first streetwalker, when he was nineteen, gave him gonorrhea, neither extinguished Boswell’s faith in his “Armour” nor dampened his enthusiasm for women. By the time he was twenty-nine, Boswell had been with at least sixty ladies of the night, from whom he contracted gonorrhea an astonishing nineteen times. His friends treated his frequent VD infections as a running joke. However, considering the primitive medical care of the eighteenth century, the bouts were probably too painful for Boswell to appreciate the humor.
Read More: 16 Historical Figures Who Suffered from STDs.