“Sic losing sarkis, so mony Glengoir markis,
Within this land was nevir hard nor sene.”[609]
In several of the notices which I have just quoted, the new disease, syphilis, is alluded to under the names of “Gor,” “Gore,” “Grandgore,” etc. Few maladies have been loaded with a more varied and more extensive nomenclature. The terms in question, “Gore” and “Grandgore,” are of French origin, and are old names corresponding to pox and great pox—“verole” and “grand verole.” In the earlier periods of the history of syphilis they were terms commonly employed by the French themselves to designate the affection. To quote one confirmatory sentence from Astruc (p. 1166), the disease “Gore et Grandgore a Gallis initio vocata erat.” John le Maire, in his celebrated poem on syphilis, published in 1520, gives this as one of the designations of the disease used at that time by the commonalty:—
“La nommoit Gorre ou la verole grosse,
Qui n’espargnoit ne couronne ne crosse.”[610]
Old Rabelais, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel are perfect repositories of the low and licentious French words of the era at which syphilis first appeared, uses the term Grandgore as a synonym for syphilis; and in his wild allegorical style he makes the poor and widowed poet, Rammagrobis, take this grandgore to bed for his second wife. The term Grandgore seems to have been applied to the disease in Scotland for a long time after its introduction. For example, the author of the Historie of the Kennedys quotes a letter written in the latter part of the sixteenth century by the Laird of Colzean to the Laird of Bargany, whose “neise was laich,” maliciously suggesting to him that yet he might lose “sum uther joynt of the Glengoir, as ye did the brig of your neise.”[611] Still later, or in 1600, the Kirk-Session of Glasgow requested the magistrates “to consult the chirurgeons how the infectious distemper of Glengore could be removed from the city.”[612]
In Scotland, as elsewhere, the disease also passed under other designations. When syphilis first broke out it was frequently, as is well known, designated from the country or people from whom it was supposed to have been transmitted. Thus, the Italians and Germans at first generally spoke of it as the French disease; while the French talked of it as the disease of Naples; and the Dutch, Flemings, Portuguese, and Moors, applied to it the name of the Spanish pocks or Castilian malady. Dunbar, in the Scottish poem already alluded to as addressed to Queen Margaret, speaks of it, in most of the stanzas, under the simple title of “pockis,” but in one he gives it, as I have already hinted, the distinctive and significant appellation of the Spanish pocks:—
“I saw cow-clinkis me besyd;
The young men to thair howssis gyd,
Had better liggit in the stockis;