Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/593

 with certain known facts—such, for example, as the published reports made by the Spanish physicians Pintor and Torrella, who describe cases of syphilis which they had treated prior to 1493 (the year in which the first discoverers returned from America). In Italy, according to Giovanni da Vigo, the author of an excellent treatise on surgery ("Practica in arte chirurgica copiosa," Rome, 1514), the disease was first observed in Europe in December, 1494, soon after the arrival of Charles the Eighth's (France) army at Naples; and only a short time elapsed before there developed, as a result of this great accession of French soldiers, a veritable epidemic of what then began to be known quite generally as "morbus gallicus" or "the French disease." The King himself, it is stated, was among the number of those who contracted the infection.

So far as I am able to discover, the term "syphilis" was first introduced into medical literature by Fracastoro, the distinguished physician of Verona, who published in 1530 a Latin poem bearing the title: "Syphilis sive morbus gallicus." These verses were received everywhere with great favor, were translated into several modern languages, and speedily put an end forever to the employment of the insulting term "morbus gallicus."

A few more words with reference to the origin and distribution of syphilis throughout the world may not seem inappropriate in this place. J. K. Proksch, the author of the most recent history of this disease, says it has been fully proved that syphilis existed among the inhabitants of India as long ago as during the Middle Ages, and he adds that the evidence thus far collected justifies the further belief that it was not an uncommon malady among the ancient Greeks and Romans, and even among the Babylonians and Assyrians. Doubtless a good deal of what was called "leprosy" in early times was in reality syphilis. Another syphilographer—Raphael Finckenstein—makes the following sensible remarks about the