Most physicists believe that the speed of light is a fundamental limit on how quickly we can move through space. This claim is based on the predictions of mathematical theories and the results of experiments that appear to support them. According to theory, it doesn't matter whether you move through space with a pogo stick or an anti-matter drive, you're still subject to the rules governing all matter in the universe and thus unable to exceed the speed of light.

What if there are limits on what you can compute? Pharmaceutical companies simulate interactions at the atomic level in searching for molecules to cure diseases. There could be viruses for which it will take years to find a vaccine – there is simply no way to speed up the necessary computations. Software developers who write the programs that keep airplanes flying and emergency rooms functioning would like to prove that their code won't malfunction and put lives at risk. But maybe it's impossible to provide such assurances.

In some cases, computational limitations can work to our advantage. Some programs exploit the difficulty of computing answers to particular problems; for example, the most popular encryption schemes for transferring information securely on the World Wide Web rely on the difficulty of computing the prime factors of large composite integers. Of course, if someone figures out how to factor large numbers efficiently, our privacy will be seriously threatened.

The first computers were used primarily to manage information for large companies and perform numerical calculations for the military. Only a few visionaries saw computing as something for everyone or imagined it could become a basic service like the telephone or electric power. This failure of imagination was due in large part to the fact that the people who controlled computing in the early years weren't the ones actually programming computers. If you worked for a large corporation or industrial laboratory, then you might have strictly limited access to a computer, but otherwise you were pretty much out of luck.

In the early years of computing, users submitted their programs to computer operators to be run in batches. You would hand the operator a stack of cards or a roll of paper tape punched full of holes that encoded your program. An operator would schedule your program to be run (possibly in the middle of the night) with a batch of other programs and at some point thereafter you would be handed a printout of the output generated by your program. You didn't interact directly with the computer and if your program crashed and produced no output, you'd have very little idea what had gone wrong.

The people who ran computer facilities were horrified at the idea of having users interact directly with their precious computers.

Programming languages come in all shapes and sizes and some of them hardly seem like programming languages at all. Of course, that depends on what you count as a programming language; as far as I'm concerned, a programming language is a language for specifying computations. But that's pretty broad and maybe we should narrow our definition to include only languages used for specifying computations to machines, that is, languages for talking with computers. Remember, though, that programmers often communicate with one another by sharing code and the programming language used to write that code can significantly influence what can or can't be easily communicated.

C, Java and Scheme are so-called general-purpose, high-level programming languages. Plenty of other programming languages were designed to suit particular purposes, among them the languages built into mathematical programming packages like Maple, Matlab and Mathematica. There are also special-purpose languages called scripting languages built into most word-processing and desktop-publishing programs that make it easier to perform repetitious tasks like personalizing invitations or making formatting changes throughout a set of documents.

Lots of computer users find themselves constantly doing routine housecleaning tasks like identifying and removing old files and searching for documents containing specific pieces of information. Modern operating systems generally provide nice graphical user interfaces to make such house-cleaning easier, but many repetitive tasks are easy to specify but tedious to carry out with these fancy interfaces.

Programming languages, like natural languages, have a vocabulary (lexicon) and rules of syntax (grammar) that you have to learn in order to communicate. Just as unfamiliar grammatical conventions can make learning a new natural language difficult, unfamiliar programming-language syntax can make learning to program difficult. English speakers learning Japanese have to get used to the fact that Japanese verbs generally come at the end of the sentence. With computer languages, the problem is made worse by the fact that computers are much less adept at handling lexically and syntactically mangled programs than humans are at grasping the meaning of garbled speech.

If you want to talk with computers, however, you're going to have to learn a programming language. Just as you learn new natural languages to communicate with other people and experience other cultures, you learn a programming language to communicate with computers and other programmers and to express computational ideas concisely and clearly. The good news is that learning one programming language makes it a lot easier to learn others.

When you start learning to program, you may find yourself consumed with sorting out the lexical and syntactic minutiae of the programming language. You'll have to look up the names of functions and operators and memorize the particular syntax required to invoke them correctly. You may end up spending obscene amounts of time tracking down obscure bugs caused by misplaced commas or missing parentheses.

While writing the previous chapter, I got to thinking about concepts in computer science that connect the microscopic, bit-level world of logic gates and machine language to the macroscopic world of procedures and processes we've been concerned with so far. In listing concepts that might be worth mentioning, I noticed that I was moving from computer architecture, the subdiscipline of computer science concerned with the logical design of computer hardware, to operating systems, the area dealing with the software that mediates between the user and the hardware.

In compiling my list, I was also struck by how many “computerese” terms and phrases have slipped into the vernacular. Interrupt handling (responding to an unexpected event while doing something else) and multitasking (the concurrent performance of several tasks) are prime examples. The common use of these terms concerns not computers but human information processing. I don't know what you'd call the jargon used by psychologists and cognitive scientists to describe how humans think. The word “mentalese” is already taken: the philosopher Jerry Fodor postulates that humans represent the external world in a “language of thought” that is sometimes called “mentalese.” Fodor's mentalese is more like machine language for minds. I'm interested in the language we use to describe how we think, how our thought processes work – a metalanguage for talking about thinking.

One consequence of inexpensive computer memory and storage devices is that much less gets thrown out. People who normally wouldn't characterize themselves as packrats find themselves accumulating megabytes of old email messages, news articles, personal financial data, digital images, digital music in various formats and, increasingly, animations, movies and other multimedia presentations. For many of us, digital memory serves to supplement the neural hardware we were born with for keeping track of things; the computer becomes a sort of neural prosthetic or memory amplifier.

However reassuring it may be to know that every aspect of your digital lifestyle is stored on your computer's hard drive, storing information doesn't do much good if you can't get at what you need when you need it. How do you recall the name of the restaurant your friend from Seattle mentioned in email a couple of years back when she told you about her new job? Or perhaps you're trying to find the recommendation for a compact digital camera that someone sent you in email or you saved from a news article. It's tough remembering where you put things and you'd rather not look through all your files each time you want to recall a piece of information.

In 1999, when NASA launched the first of its Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites, they knew they would have to do something with the terabytes (a terabyte is a billion bytes) of data streaming down from these orbiting observers.

With all my mumbo-jumbo about conjuring up spirits and casting spells, it's easy to lose track of the fact that computers are real and there is a very precise and concrete connection between the programs and fragments of code you run on your computer and the various electrical devices that make up the hardware of your machine. Interacting with the computer makes the notions of computing and computation very real, but you're still likely to feel shielded from the hardware – as indeed you are – and to be left with the impression that the connection to the hardware is all very difficult to comprehend.

For some of you, grabbing a soldering iron and a handful of logic chips and discrete components is the best path to enlightenment. I used to love tinkering with switching devices scavenged from the local telephone company, probing circuit boards to figure out what they could do and then making them do something other than what they were designed for. Nowadays, it's easier than ever to “interface” sensors and motors to computers, but it still helps to know a little about electronics even if you're mainly interested in the software side of things.

I think it's a good experience for every computer scientist to learn a little about analog circuits (for example, build a simple solid-state switch using a transistor and a couple of resistors) and integrated circuits for memory, logic and timing (build a circuit to add two binary numbers out of primitive logic gates).

So wrote one of the governors of the Westminster Infirmary in 1738. It is clearly a strong invective against allowing so-called “foul” patients into hospitals. Many have presumed that this policy was pervasive in early modern London. It was not.

Considerably more scholarship has explored venereal disease in the modern period. However, there is a growing body of literature on the early modern period that has explored medical treatises, graphic art, and literature, analyzing the various meanings that early modern doctors, artists, and playwrights attached to sexual infection. Yet early modern institutional care has received rather less attention. Robert Jütte has identified the area as a notable gap in the literature and called for further research. This study hopes to add to Jütte’s work on Germany and that of Jon Arrizabalga, John Henderson, and Roger French on Italy.

Discussions of institutional care for venereal disease in early modern England have tended to assume that the attitude expressed above by the governors of the Westminster Infirmary was standard throughout the period. Moreover, English scholarship has focused the lion’s share of attention on one particular hospital, the London Lock Hospital. The Lock, a voluntary hospital devoted exclusively to venereal disease, was established in 1747. Its appearance in the mid-eighteenth century led many to assume that impoverished venereal patients seeking treatment earlier had nowhere to turn. Historians presumed that the Lock Hospital must have filled some void, that prior hospitals must have excluded venereal patients on moral grounds. With the Enlightenment, in this view, came new tolerance and a new hospital as its manifestation. A kind of whiggishness has colored many discussions of the Lock, portraying it as a progressive step in the march of modernity. To make this case scholars have asserted that early hospital provision for venereal patients was scant or nonexistent. Arguing from a slightly different vantage point, some recent historians of sexuality have advanced a similar picture.

As the eighteenth century dawned, beds in royal hospital foul wards were becoming harder to get. The financial effects of fire and war in the 1690s severely depleted the coffers as the seventeenth century drew to a close. This fiscal pressure forced St. Bartholomew’s to stop paying to support foul patients in the outhouses after 1696. So as the new century began, venereal patients now had to come up with the four pence per day in order to stay in the outhouses, even though the hospital continued to pay to support the hundreds of patients treated each month in the clean wards of the main hospital. This two-tiered fee structure would last in one form or another throughout the century.

Bart’s did resume paying to support some venereal patients in 1703. However, the figures betray a clear shift in policy. In 1703 the governors spent just £93 to support outhouse patients while they spent in excess of £1,900 to feed clean patients. When translated into fiscal terms this means that that the hospital paid to support about 314 clean patients at a time, while they supported on average only about fifteen foul patients throughout the course of the year. In stark contrast to the pattern in the seventeenth century, when venereal patients represented such a significant portion of St. Bartholomew’s charity cases—well over 20 percent in some years—in 1703 they represented less than 5 percent of the patients supported by the governors.

However, it is important to bear in mind that these figures do not represent all the patients treated at the two outhouses, but only those receiving full hospital charity. The hospital now classified foul patients as either needy of charity or capable of paying their own way. The hospital consented to support only those who were “entirely destitute of Mony, or friends, & parish settlements.” So in late 1702 or early 1703 the governors resumed their charitable support for poor foul patients, but for a much more limited group. This renewal shows that the hospital had not entirely abandoned the people struck by the dual dilemmas of poverty and the pox. There remained some commitment to helping impoverished foul patients. However, governors now drastically limited the amount of money devoted to the cause, and began to call on parishes to contribute towards the support of their own venereal paupers.

On August 22, 1728, Flora Price applied to her churchwardens in the parish of St. Margaret’s Westminster. When questioned by the overseer’s of the poor she admitted that she was poxed and sought their help. The clerk recorded that she “be admitted into ye House till such time she can be got into ye Hospital for cure of the foul distemper.” However, she never entered a hospital. Instead, it seems she entered the workhouse and underwent mercury treatment there. Following her salivation she was discharged on October 21. The workhouse committee ordered “That Flora Price be discharged ye house & to have some old cloaths & to be sent to Bridewell upon any new Application.” Such stories are ubiquitous in eighteenth-century parochial records. Workhouse admission records register the admission of sick paupers week in and week out throughout the entire eighteenth century. Given the great prevalence of the pox one should not be surprised to learn that foul patients like Flora Price were ever-present in these institutions.

Yet the medical role of the eighteenth-century workhouse has received little attention. Studies of early modern English medical institutions have generally focused on the large hospitals like St. Bartholomew’s and St.Thomas’s or on the growing number of private specialist charities like the Lock Hospital. Yet, in parochial workhouse infirmaries there existed an important level of institutional health care for the very poor. Many paupers like Flora Price did not run immediately to a hospital when they became ill. Often their first stop (or their last resting place) was the workhouse.

Over the past decades social historians have tirelessly explored the massive landscape of English parochial records, which has yielded a wealth of rich data on the English poor. However, too few early modern medical historians have mined this body of material, much of which concerns issues related to health and healing. Focusing on a single disease in these institutions allows access to the much larger issue of eighteenth-century workhouse medicine, which still awaits proper investigation. Overall, the assumption continues that the medicalization of workhouses was a nineteenth-century phenomenon and a product of the New Poor Law. Just one example is the recent reaction to evidence of medical care in London workhouses from 1837, which, we read, “was important from an early date.”

On the night of February 7, 1734, Elizabeth and John Byon lay in a rented room that they could barely afford. John was a fan painter and he paid two pence to Magdalen Jones for one night’s lodging so that he and Elizabeth could get off the street. Elizabeth was extremely sick. John tried to explain away his wife’s weakness by telling Magdalen that she was drunk. But when what a servant would later describe as “dismalgroans” emanated from Elizabeth’s bed, Magdalen came upstairs to check what was wrong. John was afraid that Magdalen would turn them out if she knew the nature of Elizabeth’s illness, so he lied again. Changing his story he now said that Elizabeth had a cold. He had good reason to worry. Magdalen was not fooled. She ordered them out, and refused to allow them to lie in the house, despite the couple’s pleas to let them stay until morning. “You told me your wife was only drunk, but she is rotten with the Pox, she shall not lye here, and so take your Groat again, and take your Time to dress her, and carry her out.” Magdalen’s husband became impatient for them to quit the house. Not allowing them to finish dressing, he forced them into the street. It was 10:30 at night, and it was February. John helped Elizabeth to a bench where he finished dressing her. They tried to move on but they had nowhere to go. Elizabeth made it just a few blocks before she collapsed in the street and died.

John and Elizabeth had lain for two nights on the pavement in front of a churchwarden’s door, but their settlement details were contested. They sought relief in St. Ann’s, but the officers would not acknowledge them as settled parishioners. St. Ann’s officers refused to accept them without a pass from St. Giles. So they gave up seeking alms in St. Ann’s and made their way across town and into St. Giles, where Magdalen Jones lived. They may have come into the parish too late in the evening to apply for relief. Perhaps they planned to apply at the workhouse in the morning.

People of means did not lack for medical options when they contracted the “foul disease” in early modern London. This book is not about people of means. However, an understanding of the experience of poverty and the pox demands a point of comparison. For that reason we should first consider the place of the foul disease within the oft-described medical marketplace of Stuart and Georgian London. If one had money to spend, what were their options? There is no doubt that there were plenty of customers for anyone who could relieve the suffering just described. There was a rich living to be made in the trade in pox-cures, and the powerful economic force of demand indeed spurred vibrant activity in London’s medical market. Few corners of the early modern medical market could challenge VD care for the range of therapies or providers. The range of the market response to the pox was driven, not just by the widespread incidence of the disease, but also because of the unique nature of the pox. Patients diagnosed foul tended to have particular demands that others who suffered from more banal ailments did not. Attempts to provide this huge customer base with services for these unique demands resulted in a rich range of medical services. Thus there were a wide array of options for the poxed, but they were frequently not cheap. And there is the rub. For early modern London had a two-tiered medical system, to use modern parlance; private fee-based care of the market existed alongside publicly funded care for the poor. The bulk of this book will explore the forms that such public care took. But to make the most sense of it we must first explore VD care in the private sector, and this means first studying care for middling and well-off Londoners.

In addition to the desire to ease their physical suffering, which all medical customers sought, venereal patients also made unique demands springing from the socio-cultural reactions specific to the pox, namely its stigma. There has been some disagreement regarding the relative stigma attached to the disease over the long period. Some scholars have asserted that early modern sensibilities regarded venereal infection with cavalier light-heartedness, particularly during the Restoration.