Cupid's Disease

Here's an interesting thought....maybe a sexually transmitted disease will increase your sex drive when you're ninety years old. Kind of random you say? Ah...well maybe so, but it's still interesting. I'm talking about a chapter in Dr. Oliver Sacks's book- The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. This particular chapter is called "Cupid's Disease." An eighty-eight year-old woman came into Sack's office one day after a year of feeling "frisky." She really had no problem with this, but her friends and family started worrying because they noticed it as a big change. So she began to think that something was affecting her brain, and so she went to see Dr. Sacks. She explained to him that nearly 70 years ago she was in a brothel and contracted syphilis (Cupid's Disease), which she had treated, but it was suppressed rather than eradicated. She thought maybe it could have caught up with her now. And indeed it had. In the state she was in now she was like a young woman again, and she wished to live out her days like it. So rather than completely getting rid of it, the disease was just halted where it was. She would encounter no more damage to her brain, but the giddiness and friskiness would remain. It's an interesting situation when a disease has a positive effect in terms of what changes it evokes. Is it still a disease as we understand it? Does it actually change our personality or does it just bring out aspects of our person that we didn't know existed before?

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