The Third Great Plague

Chapter I

The History of Syphilis

Syphilis has a remarkable history,[1] about which it is worth while to say a few words.  Many people think of the disease as at least as old as the Bible, and as having been one of the conditions included under the old idea of leprosy.  Our growing knowledge of medical history, however, and the finding of new records of the disease, have shown this view to be in all probability a mistake.  Syphilis was unknown in Europe until the return of Columbus and his sailors from America, and its progress over the civilized world can be traced step by step, or better, in leaps and bounds, from that date.  It came from the island of Haiti, in which it was prevalent at the time the discoverers of America landed there, and the return of Columbus’s infected sailors to Europe was the signal for a blasting epidemic, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries devastated Spain, Italy, France, and England, and spread into India, Asia, China, and Japan.

    [1] For a detailed account in English, see Pusey, W. A.:  “Syphilis
    as a Modern Problem,” Amer.  Med.  Assoc., 1915.

It is a well-recognized fact that a disease which has never appeared among a people before, when it does attack them, spreads with terrifying rapidity and pursues a violent and destructive course on the new soil which they offer.  This was the course of syphilis in Europe in the years immediately following the return of Columbus in 1493.  Invading armies, always a fruitful means of spreading disease, carried syphilis with them everywhere and left it to rage unchecked among the natives when the armies themselves went down to destruction or defeat.  Explorers and voyagers carried it with them into every corner of the earth, so that it is safe to say that in this year of grace 1917 there probably does not exist a single race or people upon whom syphilis has not set its mark.  The disease, in four centuries, coming seemingly out of nowhere, has become inseparably woven into the problems of civilization, and is part and parcel of the concerns of every human being.  The helpless fear caused by the violence of the disease in its earlier days, when the suddenness of its attack on an unprepared people paralyzed comprehension, has given place to knowledge such as we can scarcely duplicate for any of the other scourges of humanity.  The disease has in its turn become more subtle and deceiving, its course is seldom marked by the bold and glaring destructiveness, the melting away of resistance, so familiar in its early history.  The masses of sores, the literal falling to pieces of skeletons, are replaced by the inconspicuous but no less real deaths from heart and brain and other internal diseases, the losses to sight and hearing, the crippling and death of children, and all the insidious, quiet deterioration and degeneration of our fiber which syphilis brings about.  From devouring a man alive on the street, syphilis has taken to knifing him quietly in his bed.