SOURCE: “Renaissance Moralizing about Syphilis and Prevention,” in Medical Ethics in the Renaissance, Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1995, pp. 162-202.

In the following excerpt, Schleiner considers the moral connotations that physicians of the Renaissance associated with veneral disease.

While the problems of removing male and female seed have received little attention by modern historians of medicine or of anthropology, the history of venereal disease—more specifically, the morbus Gallicus or syphilis—has been the focus of considerable interest. Modern discussions include the following questions: Was the morbus Gallicus a new disease or not? Why did it spread so quickly at the end of the fifteenth century? How and why did cures shift during the Renaissance (for instance, from mercury to guaiacum or lignum Indicum)? To what extent did the difficulty or even impossibility of integrating the disease into humoral medicine contribute to that system's demise? All these...