Columbus and the Indians - origins of European syphilis - Columbus and the New World Order 1492-1992

Monthly Review, July-August, 1992 by Theodor Rosebury

Dr. Webster's invitation to review the story of Columbus and his relation to the origin of syphilis has given me the impetus to reconsider the subject for the third time. I went over it first nearly forty years ago, in 1934. As a junior instructor in bacteriology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York at that time, I was asked by F.P. Gay, the head of the department, to write the chapter on "Spirochetes and Spirochetal Diseases" in what emerged a year later as the bulky textbook, Agents of Disease and Host Resistance.[1] In the intervening years I included this topic in lectures to medical and dental students; and, like most others with an interest in syphilis, I kept on using pretty much the same story, being generally too busy with things that seemed more urgent to go back and reconsider it again, even though I was aware that doubts were accumulating in the literature. When I wrote a book on VD for the general reader, Microbes and Morals, which appeared in the fall of 1973,[2] I returned to the literature for the second time, reassessed those doubts, and decided that the weight of the evidence was against the Columbian origin of syphilis in Europe. For this third occasion I have gone back to the record once more, or to as much of it as I have in my own collection of books, reprints, and notes.3 As a result I am even more convinced that the old story is a myth and ought to be discarded.

Let me set the stage briefly. The period of Columbus, the early Renaissance, was one in which a new freedom in art and technology, symbolized by, and embodied in, Leonardo da Vinci, was struggling against the persistent authority of the medieval church. Science as we know it-experimental science-waited another century to be born. It is said to be no accident that Columbus' first voyage was made in the same year when, with the conquest of Granada by Spain, the Moors lost their last foothold in Europe, or that, at the very time Columbus was preparing to sail from Palos, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain was decreed. This was an era both of exploration and of Torquemada and Sprenger and the Malleus Maleficarum, the manual of the art of torturing witches. The wealth and power of both church and state were expanding, encouraging art, architecture, exploration, and conquest-anything that would increase that wealth and power--but discouraging behavior that seemed to defy authority, including what was called witchcraft as well as the budding growth of the new science. It is also no accident that Leonardo kept his notes in cramped mirror script, that the theory of Copernicus was published only shortly before he died, that Fracastor first wrote about syphilis in verse and later, in his more serious work, made frequent obeisance to the prevailing dogma, such as the effects of planets on disease.4 The attribution of syphilis to Columbus began during this period and in this atmosphere. Even so, it began slowly, and as Buret and Hudson, among others, have pointed out, it has had its ups and downs through the centuries.5 Buret thinks it was Astruc, 250 years after Columbus, who first really fastened the idea on the world.[6]

But by the time I wrote my chapter for Gay's Agents of Disease most of us took the Columbus story for granted. It is curious in retrospect that what I wrote about it seemed not to require any references in an otherwise heavily documented book. My chapter had of course been read in manuscript by senior members of the department, who accepted it just as I did. Let me quote what I said:

There are indications that syphilis may have existed in Europe before the Middle Ages, but is seems to have appeared first in epidemic form in 1495. At the siege of Naples during that year, it is said to have been communicated to the French invaders by Spanish mercenaries who, according to an incompletely substantiated report, acquired it from Columbus' sailors, a "visitation" from the New World. As it spread through Europe during the period immediately following, syphilis was manifested in a form much more severe than is known today, suggesting that the disease fell upon virgin soil. It ranked with plague as a great scourge of the period.

Of the four sentences in that paragraph, only the opening clause, "There are indications that syphilis may have existed in Europe before the Middle Ages," and the later qualifying phrase, "according to an incompletely substantiated report," are unexceptionable. The rest of it contains at least nine points I would now object to as either flatly wrong or highly doubtful. Let me consider them one by one.

(1) Syphilis "appeared... in epidemic form .... "A good lawyer could make a case for this, but in the sense in which it was intended it was probably an error. The point is not whether there was a lot of syphilis around in the late fifteenth century: there probably was. Rather it is the one made by Hans Zinsser, that the disease of the period was, in his words, "a far more virulent, acute, and fatal condition than it is now."? Zinsser based these words largely on Fracastor, to whom we will return; but the idea of an epidemic seems to have depended rather on Ruy Dias da Isla, whose tract, published in 1539, seems to have contained the key mistake.8 Da Isla was a doctor who probably saw a lot of syphilis around Columbus' time. He described three stages of the disease, the first two of which are entirely acceptable. They represented, first, mainly secondary, syphilis, and late syphilis, but not the most fatal forms affecting the cardiovascular system or the brain and spinal cord. These were not recognized as syphilis until the nineteenth century. Da Isla's third stage involved a continued high fever, high mortality, and symptoms more suggestive, as Karl Sudhoff pointed out, of the then undifferentiated typhustyphoid syndrome than anything else.[9] This seems to be the epidemic Zinsser was referring to, although I am reluctant to suggest that Zinsser could have missed typhus. Sudhoff speaks simply of "typhoid." Anyway Sudhoff was dismissed as recently as ten years ago by another eminent author, W.L. Fleming, on the ground that he was "almost alone among historians" in suggesting that the epidemic was not syphilis.[10] But if counting heads is in order, E .H. Hudson had joined Sudhoffa long time ago, and so have I; and that makes three.