Did physicians in the first century AD understand that some diseases are sexually transmitted? Would a typical well-educated person who was not a physician have likely known this?
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This is outside my area of expertise. From a cursory reading of the literature I get the impression that at present there is no clarity on what sexually transmitted diseases known today were actually present in classical antiquity, as the clues available in surviving writings from that time are sparse and vague, leading authors to speculate based on scant evidence. The following, by a classicist with a focus on medicine in classical antiquity, therefore looks like a plausible summary.
Rebecca Flemming, "(The Wrong Kind of) Gonorrhea in Antiquity." In Simon Szreter (ed.), The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History, University of Rochester Press 2019, pp. 43-67. On p. 46 (my bolding):
While many Latin satirists enjoyed exposing all Rome’s sexual foibles in explicit detail, if there is evidence of STIs to be found in antiquity, this is the best place to look. The argument is, however, that no such evidence is to be found. The symptoms of painful urination and some kind of vaginal or penile discharge, perhaps with swelling of the foreskin or lower abdominal pain, the conjunction of which would be taken to indicate modern gonorrhea (and, indeed, chlamydia), do not appear together in any ancient medical text, nor in any other part of the ancient literary record. This is a significant absence, given the dense coverage of human ailments, injuries, and cures in written material from classical Greece and Rome. Nor are notions of the sexual transmission of disease to be found in antiquity; sexual encounters were not considered sites of pathological danger.
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$\begingroup$ Thank you! If I'm not misunderstanding this, it seems to imply that not only were STDs not known to be sexually transmitted; they actually did not exist at the time. Is that correct? $\endgroup$– SomeoneCommented Feb 25 at 4:21
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1$\begingroup$ @Someone That is not my reading. Ms. Flemming appears to argue that "modern gonorrhea" did not exist in ancient Rome, but considers it possible that an infection based on a precursor pathogen may have existed then. Similar scenarios apply to other sexually transmitted diseases, e.g. Syphilis was long believed to have been introduced to Europe from the Americas; more recently this has been called into question. So while the prevalence of STDs in antiquity is unclear, it seems clear that there is no textual evidence that sexual transmission of diseases was considered in antiquity (your question) $\endgroup$– njuffaCommented Feb 25 at 4:37