Syphilis and the Shepherd of Atlantis

Natural History, Oct, 2000 by Stephen Jay Gould

The most "poetic" statement about the dreaded plague is not an early physician's hexameter but the modern map of the pathogen's genome.

We usually manage to confine our appetite for mutual recrimination to merely petty or mildly amusing taunts. Among English speakers, unannounced departures (especially with bills left unpaid) or military absences without permission go by the epithet of "taking French leave." But a Frenchman calls the same, presumably universal, human tendency filer a l'anglaise, or "taking English leave." I learned, during an undergraduate year in England, that the condoms I had bought (for no realized purpose, alas) were "French letters" to my fellow students. In France that summer, my fellow students of another nation called the same item a chapeau anglais, or "English hat."

But this form of pettiness can escalate to danger. Names and symbols inflame us, and wars have been fought over flags and soccer matches. Thus, when syphilis first began to ravage Europe in the 1480s or 1490s (the distinction, as we shall see, becomes crucial), a debate erupted about naming rights for this novel plague--that is, the right to name the disease for your enemies. The first major outbreak had occurred in Naples in the mid-1490s, so the plague became, for some, the Italian or the Neapolitan disease. According to one popular theory (still under debate, in fact), syphilis had arrived from the New World, brought back by Columbus's sailors, who had pursued the usual activities in novel places--hence "the Spanish disease." The plague had been sufficiently acute a bit northeast of Columbus's site of return--hence "the German disease." In the most popular moniker of all, for this nation maintained an impressive supply of enemies, syphilis became "the French disease" (morbus Gallicus in medical treatises, then usually published in Latin), with blame cast upon the troops of the young French king, Charles VIII, who had conquered Naples, where the disease first reached epidemic proportions, in 1495. Supporters of this theory then blamed the spread through the rest of Europe on the activities of Charles's large corps of mercenary soldiers, who, upon demobilization, fanned out to their homes all over the continent.

I first encountered this debate in a succinct summary written by Ludovico Moscardo, who described potential herbal remedies in the catalog of his museum, published in 1672: "Ne sapendo, a chi dar la colpa, li spagnuoli lo chiamorono real Francese, li Francesi male Napolitano, eli Tedeschi, real Spagnuolo" (not knowing whom to blame, the Spaniards call it the French disease, the French the Neapolitan disease, and the Germans the Spanish disease). Moscardo then added that other people attribute the origins of syphilis to bad airs generated by a conjunction of the three most distant planets--Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn--in the night sky.

How, then, did the new plague receive its modern name of syphilis, and what does "syphilis" mean, anyway? The peculiar and fascinating tale of the naming of syphilis can help us to understand two key principles of scholarship that may seem contradictory at first but that must be amalgamated into a coherent picture if we hope to appreciate both the theories of our forebears and the power of science to overcome past error: first, that the apparently foolish concepts of early scientists made sense in their times and can therefore teach us to respect their struggles, and second, that these older beliefs were truly erroneous and that science both progresses, in any meaningful sense of the term, and holds immense promise for human benefit through correction of error and discovery of genuine natural truths.

"Syphilis," the proper name of a fictional shepherd, entered our language in a long poem composed in 1,300 verses of elegant Latin hexameter and published in 1530 by the greatest physician of his generation (and my second favorite character of the time, after Leonardo da Vinci)--a gentleman from Verona (also the home of Romeo and Juliet), Girolamo Fracastoro (1478-1553). Fracastoro dabbled in astronomy (he became friendly with Copernicus when both studied medicine at Padua), made some crucial geological observations about the nature of fossils, wrote dense philosophical treatises and long classical poems, and held high status as the most celebrated physician of his time (in his role as papal doctor, for example, he supervised the transfer of the Council of Trent to Bologna in 1547, both to honor his holiness's political preferences and to avoid a threatened epidemic). In short, a Renaissance man of the Renaissance itself.

My inspiration for this essay flowed from the stark contrast between Fracastoro's christening of syphilis in 1530 and the style and substance of a 1998 paper on the genome of the bacterium that truly causes syphilis. Fracastoro could not resolve the origins of syphilis and didn't even recognize its venereal mode of transmission. So he wrote a poem and devised a myth, naming syphilis to honor a fictional shepherd of his own invention. In greatest contrast, the sober paper published by thirty-three coauthors in Science magazine (July 17, 1998) resolves the 1,138,006 base pairs--arranged in a sequence of 1,041 genes--in the genome of Treponema pallidum, the undoubted biological cause of syphilis.