Nous lui prions qu’il nous garde et console,
Pour corriger mondains luxurieux,
S’est engendree ceste grosse verole.”
Notwithstanding the undoubted proof of the antiquity of venereal diseases, Astruc, as we all know, defends the American origin of the malady, and endeavors to support his views on the hypothesis emitted by Ulrich de Hutten in 1519, i.e., at the siege of Naples, at the end of 1494, a Spanish army commanded by Gonsalva of Cordova came to the rescue of the besieged. Their soldiers communicated to the girls of the town and the courtesans of the neighborhood the maladie Americaine (American disease), which was contracted in turn, after the capture of Naples, by the army of King Charles, and afterwards spread throughout France. But history informs us that the King of France did not return to Paris with his troops from the Italian campaign until the month of March, 1496. Now it was on the 6th of March, in this same year, that Parliament issued a proclamation regulating the pox, in which the first section reads: “To-day, the 6th of March, whereas in the City of Paris a disease of a certain contagious character, known as verole (pox), prevails, the which has made much progress in the Realm the past two years, as well at Paris as in other places, and there is reason to fear, this being Springtime, that it may increase, it is deemed expedient to take cognizance of the same.”
Other testimony is gathered from the narrative of the voyages of Christopher Columbus by his contemporary Petrus Martyr, of Anghierra, historian attached to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. According to the notes given him by the great navigator on his return to Spain, authentic records kept from day to day,[47] the Spanish and Italian sailors of Columbus found “people who lived in the Age of Gold; with no ditches, no fences, no books, no laws. The men were entirely naked, the women only protected by a belly-band of light material; notwithstanding all this, their morals were pure.” Besides, Petrus Martyr (La Syphilis au XV. Siecle) proves there was syphilis in Spain in 1487.
When Columbus returned to Europe a second time he left behind him, under orders of his brother, a hundred of his companions in arms, who were a collection of adventurers from all the nations of the earth. These men committed all sorts of excesses among the unfortunate Indians—steeping themselves in lust and every manner of crime, violating the women, and indulging in wholesale debauchery. Says Charles Renaut: “Looking at matters from this standpoint, I am ready to believe that the Spaniards carried the disease to the natives of Hispanola, and that the latter did not give the malady to the Spanish.”
We shall not dwell further on the origin of syphilis, nor its connection with leprosy and other cutaneous maladies which were so prevalent in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. We may consider the disease as something new, and trace its period of invasion and development to the discovery of America, or assert that it arose from a semi extinct affection (leprosy), assuming a new type under the influence of a special epidemic constitution.
One thing is clearly proven, i.e., that syphilis was preceded by contagious venereal affections, which lost the irregular and malignant forms of the fifteenth century. When then the civilized nations of earth create a true Public Health Service, syphilis will be vanquished, and will pass away to the ranks of other extinct maladies.