Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/592



THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF SYPHILIS IN EUROPE AS AN EPIDEMIC DISEASE.—MEDICAL JOURNALISM.—THE BEGINNINGS OF A MODERN PHARMACOPOEIA.—ITINERANT LITHOTOMISTS

Toward the end of the fifteenth and during the early part of the sixteenth centuries accounts concerning syphilis began to be published in the medical literature of Spain, Italy and France. The word "syphilis," it is true, does not appear in any of these records, for it had not yet been coined; but the accounts themselves leave no room for doubt that this was the disease to which the authors of these records referred. The prevailing views with regard to the origin and nature of syphilis differed somewhat in the three countries named. In Spain, for example, it was a common belief that the disease originated in an unfavorable conjunction of the stars and yet at the same time it was generally admitted that it was a disease which belonged in the category of luxuries and might be avoided if one were careful not to have intercourse with dissolute women. For a brief period of time there were physicians in all three of the Latin countries who maintained that syphilis had been imported, in the first instance, from America by the men who made the voyage with Columbus and by the earliest Spanish explorers of South America; but it was soon shown that this theory was not compatible