Wilson's Disease

Had he secretly hated Nurse Wilson, no one could really blame him. Had he imagined she was the one who destroyed his penis and caused him so much anguish, that would be understandable. Had he hated his mother, who was far away from him during his ordeal, that would come as no surprise. In the nineteenth century, to be born illegitimate or to be the child of an illegitimate parent was a terrible stigma. When Sickert's maternal grandmother had sex out of wedlock, according to Victorian standards, she enjoyed it, which implied that she suffered from the same genetic disorder that prostitutes did. The common belief was that this congenital defect was passed down the bloodline and was a "contagious blood poison" routinely described in the newspapers as a "disease that has been the curse of mankind from an early period in the history of the race, leaving its baneful effects on posterity to the third and fourth generations." Sickert might have blamed his boyhood agonies, his humiliations, and his maimed masculinity on a genetic defect or "blood poison" that he inherited from his immoral dance-hall grandmother and his illegitimate mother ...»