Items related to The Third Great Plague: A Discussion of Syphilis for...
Synopsis
he History of Syphilis
Syphilis has a remarkable history,[1] about which it is worth while to say a
few words. Many people think of the disease as at least as old as the Bible,
and as having been one of the conditions included under the old idea of lep-
rosy. Our growing knowledge of medical history, however, and the finding
of new records of the disease, have shown this view to be in all probability
a mistake. Syphilis was unknown in Europe until the return of Columbus
and his sailors from America, and its progress over the civilized world can be
traced step by step, or better, in leaps and bounds, from that date. It came
from the island of Haiti, in which it was prevalent at the time the discover-
ers of America landed there, and the return of Columbus's infected sailors to
Europe was the signal for a blasting epidemic, which in the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries devastated Spain, Italy, France, and England, and spread
into India, Asia, China, and Japan.
[1] For a detailed account in English, see Pusey, W. A.: "Syphilis as a Modern
Problem," Amer. Med. Assoc., 1915.
It is a well-recognized fact that a disease which has never appeared among
3 JOHN H. (JOHN HINCHMAN) STOKES
a people before, when it does attack them, spreads with terrifying rapidity
and pursues a violent and destructive course on the new soil which they of-
fer. This was the course of syphilis in Europe in the years immediately fol-
lowing the return of Columbus in 1493. Invading armies, always a fruitful
means of spreading disease, carried syphilis with them everywhere and left
it to rage unchecked among the natives when the armies themselves went
down to destruction or defeat. Explorers and voyagers carried it with them
into every corner of the earth, so that it is safe to say that in this year of grace
1917 there probably does not exist a single race or people upon whom syphilis
has not set its mark. The disease, in four centuries, coming seemingly out of
nowhere, has become inseparably woven into the problems of civilization,
and is part and parcel of the concerns of every human being. The helpless
fear caused by the violence of the disease in its earlier days, when the sud-
denness of its attack on an unprepared people paralyzed comprehension,
has given place to knowledge such as we can scarcely duplicate for any of the
other scourges of humanity. The disease has in its turn become more subtle
and deceiving, its course is seldom marked by the bold and glaring destruc-
tiveness, the melting away of resistance, so familiar in its early history. The
masses of sores, the literal falling to pieces of skeletons, are replaced by the
inconspicuous but no less real deaths from heart and brain and other in-
ternal diseases, the losses to sight and hearing, the crippling and death of
children, and all the insidious, quiet deterioration and degeneration of our
fiber which syphilis brings about. From devouring a man alive on
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