So, this lues venerea, as it is called by Fernel, made numerous victims in all countries. It spread in the towns and throughout the rural districts, and, at times, caused such ravages that, in the large cities, the authorities were obliged to use sanitary measures against the pox, as had been done at other times in the case of leprosy. Syphilitics were expelled from places and forbidden, under severe penalties, from having intercourse with healthy people. But it soon came to be known that contagion could only occur through sexual connection, and the patients then hid in hospitals, where they were specially treated by the methods laid down by the first syphilographers,—vapor baths, mercurial inunctions, frictions, etc. Unfortunately, no prophylactic measures were instituted against prostitutes, although they were recognized as having a monopoly in venereal disorders; for they did not believe at that time, like Jean de Lorme, who said: “The pox may be caught by touching an infected person; by breathing the same air; by stepping, barefooted, in the patient’s sputa, and in many other manners.”
Even the poets wrote sonnets, poems and ballads upon this mal d’amour (lovesickness). One could form an immense volume by collecting all the verses written and published on this subject during the sixteenth century. But no poem indited during that period presents so great an interest to medical science as the ballad of Jean Droyn, of Amiens, dedicated to the Prince, in which the author, stronger in the etiology of syphilis than the doctors of his time, advised young men who feared grosse verole (the pox) not to indulge in liasons with girls of the town without first being satisfied with their pathological innocence.
This ballad was published at Lyons in 1512, that is to say, seventeen years after the appearance of the disease in the army of Charles VIII., at an epoch when the majority of doctors considered the affection as an infectious malady due to the action of a pestilential miasm in the air. We shall reproduce but a few lines of this poetical-medical-historical document:
“Perfumed darlings, dandies, dudes,
Take warning in each case,
Beware all types of fleshy nudes
And don’t fall in disgrace.
Sure, gentlemen and tradesmen gay
May throw away their money,
Give banquets and at gaming play,