[853] Burnet (History of his own Time, I. 395-6, Oxford, 1823) retails a good deal of unsavoury gossip concerning the disease in noble and princely personages after the Restoration.
[854] Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality. By Captain John Graunt, F.R.S. Preface dated from Birchin Lane, January, 1662.
[855] The origin of syphilis from leprosy has been maintained in a modern work by Friedr. Alex. Simon, Kritische Geschichte des Ursprungs, der Pathologie und Behandlung der Syphilis, Tochter und widerum Mutter des Aussatzes. Hamburg, 1857-8.
[856] Hirsch, Geographical and Historical Pathology (Translated), II. 67, 68, 81.
[857] In Hensler, p. 14, and Appendix, p. 11.
[858] Ibid., App. p. 15.
[859] In Hensler, Appendix, p. 66.
[860] The rise of the pox in the Italian wars, with its dispersion over all Europe, comes into “The Smallpox, a Poem” by “Andrew Tripe, M.D.,” London, 1748:
“Whip! thro’ both camps, halloo! it ran,
Nor uninfected left a man ...
Hence soon thro’ Italy it flew
Veiled for a while from mortal view,
When suddenly in various modes,
It shone display’d in shankers, nodes,
Swell’d groins, and pricking shins, and headaches
And a long long long string of dread aches ...
From thence with every sail unfurl’d
It traversed almost all the world ...
Until at length this Stygian fury
Worked its foul way to our blest Drury,
Where still Lord Paramount it reigns,
Pregnant with sharp nocturnal pains,” etc.
[861] I do not include among the good evidence the often quoted letter of Peter Martyr to a professor of Greek at Salamanca, under the date of “nonis Aprilis, 1488,” in which “morbus Gallicus” is used as well as the Spanish name “las bubas.” It seems to me certain that the date should be 1498, or something else than 1488, the correspondence having gone on until 1525. The same kind of misdating occurs among the printed letters of Erasmus.