Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns

by David Margolick

Since the Abbess has been chosen to write our biography, we see no reason why we shouldn’t give her the reasons for our sequestration, which have been hushed as effectively as the pregnancy of a nun. It seems that the dreadful life here isn’t as free of consequence as it is under the gonfalon of the Statue of Liberty, and that in the course of our Italian brwaugh some of the sisterhood infected us with a spirochete or two. In due time these produced their fruit on our so far immaculate body and we went screaming to the dispensary to show various medical officers our now maculate skin. After a round of Kahns and Wassermans [sic]‡ we were immured in a venereal ward along with other burnt Ay-rabs, French, Italians, and Americans. We can truthfully say now that we’ve seen everything. The new treatment for syphilis is drastic, but it takes only eight days, having just been proved in the land of the free. Sixty hypodermics of penicillin were forced into us subcutaneously, once every three hours day and night. The results are more miraculous than anything Bernadette Soubirous§ saw at Lourdes; we now propose a statue to Professor Penicil on the Abbey Grounds. Just how much infected soldiers endured in Bagnoli can be gleaned only from what Burns later wrote about it in The Gallery; though it was a historic enterprise—penicillin, which had gone into mass production a year earlier, had only just begun to be administered for venereal disease—a stop in the venereal disease ward at the ...