Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived when it struck America in the 1980s.

In 2007 Allen donated his collection of safe sex pamphlets to the Fales Library at NYU. Peter Lewis Allen (born 1957) is a scholar author and educator. He worked at McKinsey & Company in New York from 2000 to 2007 when he moved to San Francisco to become the Director of Google University (Google Inc.