The Phantom of the Opera has Syphilis

It explains almost everything.

Pictured: Euphemism.

Warning: This post will include pictures of human remains and descriptions of medical conditions. If these are offensive or disturbing to you, turn back now.

Also, spoilers for Phantom of the Opera musical and novel. But if you haven’t seen the musical by now … dude.

In every class wherein I have an excuse to do so I try to show pictures of advanced treponemal disease because a.) it is amazing and b.) there is no better way to convince young people to wrap it up when boning. Also, I really like grossing out eighteen-year-olds. They think they’re so cool. But anyways I only deal with these things in dry bone and theory so I don’t typically work with people who are both alive and have these diseases. And for that reason despite having an unhealthy and kind of unfathomable love for Phantom of the Opera, I didn’t until recently make the connection that Erik almost definitely has syphilis.

We’re going to do this right so first I want to lay out his symptoms and do some differential diagnosis.

Erik is past his prime and there’s a bit of what I think is retconning in the later version of the musical, but we don’t know really if his deformation is congenital, developmental, or acquired. But we do know he’s an older murderous gentleman. In all of his descriptions his face is messed up. In the novel he’s described as having a death’s head for a face and in the musical as well as the first movie he is missing his nose. He seems to be reasonably athletic and dexterous and he doesn’t seem to have any cognitive issues, but he is absolutely off his rocker bonkers town (medical term, that), and in the musical he implies that he’s impotent. Well, what he says is “this fate which condemns me to wallow in blood has also denied me the joys of the flesh.” So I assume either he’s impotent or his pee-pee is all tore up. (Also a medical term.)