Epidemics have always been pictured as hothouses of emotions, sparking the sudden rise of compassion, panic, fear, hate, and violence. Over the past sixty years or more, historians have seized on the last four of these traits, and have seen pandemics across time and space as giving rise to the stigmatization and blame of the “other.” As Rene Baehrel held in his classic article in Les Annales (1952), epidemics have always sparked hate and class enmity, such reactions are part of our “structures mentales … constantes psychologiques.” With the eruption of HIV-AIDS in the 1980s, these conclusions gained force from a wide variety of well-known scholars across disciplines. According to Carlo Ginzburg, “the prodigious trauma of great pestilences intensified the search for a scapegoat on which fears, hatreds and tension of all kind could be discharged.” By the reckoning of Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman, “Blaming has always been a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible and therefore possibly controllable.” Roy Porter concurred with Susan Sontag: “deadly diseases especially when there is no cure to hand … and the aetiology … is obscure … spawn sinister connotations.” And most recently, from earthquake-wrecked, cholera-plagued Haiti, Paul Farmer has proclaimed: “Blame was, after all, a calling card of all transnational epidemics.” Scholars post-AIDS have, moreover, introduced at least implicitly a new historical dynamic to this supposed universal “fact” of collective psychology: when the causes and cures of epidemic disease are unknown, hatred of the other becomes more likely, more pronounced. By this logic, the decline of magic in the sixteenth, the scientific revolution in the seventeenth, the Enlightenment in the eighteenth, and the laboratory revolution of the late nineteenth century, would have made diseases progressively more comprehensible. Consequently, the search for scapegoats to pin the blame of a disease ought to have been on the wane from early modernity on. The AIDS experience adds another ingredient to this cultural-psychological frame: sexual transmission of diseases has been postulated as especially explosive in propelling hate and suspicion.7 These three elements – the newness, mysteriousness, and sexual character of a disease – came together with syphilis's appearance8 at the end of the fifteenth century.