Here are some excerpts
In the 1490s, a gruesome new disease exploded across Europe. It moved with terrifying speed. Within five years of the first reported cases, among the mercenary army hired by Charles VIII of France to conquer Naples, it was all over the continent and reaching into north Africa.
As its many names attest, contemporaries of the first spread of syphilis did not know where this disease had come from. Was it indeed the fault of the French? Was it God's punishment on earthly sinners?
Another school of thought, less xenophobic and less religious, soon gained traction. Columbus's historic voyage to the New World was in 1492. The Italian soldiers were noticing angry chancres on their genitals by 1494. What if Columbus had brought the disease back to Europe with him as an unwelcome stowaway aboard the Pinta or the Niña?
... [S]cientists, anthropologists, and historians still disagree about the origin of syphilis. Did Columbus and his sailors really transport the bacterium back from the New World? Or was it just coincidental timing, that the first cases were recorded soon after the adventurers' triumphant return to the Old World? It seems increasingly likely that Columbus and his crew were responsible for transporting syphilis from the New World to the Old.
Of course, Treponema pallidum was not the only microbial passenger to hitch a ride across the Atlantic with Columbus. But most of the traffic was going the other way: smallpox, measles, and bubonic plague were only some of the Old World diseases which infiltrated the New World, swiftly decimating thousands of Native Americans. Syphilis was not the French disease, or the Polish disease. It was the disease – and the revenge – of the Americas.
The Guardian and The Observer
21 comments:
"Getting to know you
Getting to know all about you
Getting to like you
Getting to hope you like me"
I'm just in that kind of mood today. Love is all around us.
A lot of people think you can only get syphilis from sex but Al Capone got it in prison so there must be at least one other way.
Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes. Bear with me.
Two trappers in Alaska were playing pool. Beautiful Indian maiden was watching them.
Trapper 1 says: "You see that squaw over there? I banged her like a drum all night long. She loved it, too. All night long, she was crying 'Cowabunga!'"
Trapper 2: "Do Tell."
Trapper 1 chalks his cue and starts to line up his shot.
Trapper 1: "Yeah, all night long. I'd give her my twister move and she'd squeal '"Cowabunga!'"
Trapper 2: "You really gave her what for, eh?"
Trapper 1: "You bet. 5 ball in the corner pocket."
The cue ball hit the 5 ball and it ricocheted off the side of the corner pocket, hit one rail, and landed in the side pocket.
"Cowabunga!" the squaw cried. "Wrong hole!"
The only good one, as they say...
We did give them smallpox and measles in return, so everything came out even.
Share and share alike.
The sailors should have wondered why so many braves were named Weeping Chancre.
I thought the Americas to Europe was always the accepted theory?
Or perhaps it was the sheep they brought with them to The New World.
NTTAWWT.
From what I've read, the native girls were very ... "friendly".
I recall a single-panel cartoon, a father-and-son chat: "Dad, when you were my age, did you have a sore on your penis that hurt when you put it up the cat?"
Probably from National Lampoon's "Cartoons Even We Wouldn't Dare Print."
A valuable resource.
The first sailors were probably really digging it because the native girls had yet to hear about the missionary position.
Wait. I thought the Chinese or the Vikings got here way before Columbus ever did. I would blame them first.
If the Europeans had recognized the Native American tribes as sovereign nations, begun formal diplomatic relations, and opened the Atlantic to free trade among equals, smallpox and syphilis would have had exactly the same effect.
Why is there no call for reparations?
I wonder if any of those guys got their diagnosis and said, "Yeah Doc, maybe, but it was worth it."
A sailor's lifespan was not that long anyway, so yea, it was probably worth it.
" I thought the Chinese or the Vikings got here way before Columbus ever did"
And the Japanese.
And the Polynesians.
And some lost Jewish tribe.
And the paleo-Europeans who may have gotten here before anyone from Asia set foot on North or South America.
Fun fact: The bubonic plague came from Asia.
They gave us lung cancer too.
I thought the Americas to Europe was always the accepted theory?
There's the problem that the European patient zeroes appeared in Naples rather than Lisbon, Huelva or Genoa. I've seen claims that members of Columbus's crews were part of Charles VIII's large mercenary army, but we're not talking about a large number of men, here. About forty-five or so, most of whom were Huelvan sailors, and many of whom shipped out again with Columbus on his second voyage.
The most picturesque theory is that Martin Alonso Pinzon brought syphilis home to Palos with him, and dying of it. His brothers skipped the second voyage, instead having gone a-viking along the Algerian coast in 1493 and generally bummed about the western Med for the five years after the first voyage. But Martin Alonso died so quickly after making landfall that one strains to imagine how he might have passed the venereal disease in the two or three days he survived on shore - he was supposedly carried off his ship on a stretcher.
All things being equal, it seems more likely that syphilis was waiting for the French in Naples, than it came with Charles' army itself. The biggest component of his army were Swiss, not Castilians, after all.
and that the Christianists burned Rome.
But they did! The Visigoths were Arians for a century before they sacked Rome, and so were the Vandals, albeit of more recent vintage, IIRC.
For sheer irony, though, I like the 1527 sack, which was perpetuated by the largely Lutheran mercenaries of Emperor Charles V's mutinied army, which went to pieces when the Emperor failed to pay them in a timely manner. Of course, many of those mercenaries had been recruited by captains waving nooses and shouting about hanging the Pope, so this is the sort of thing that you might call "overdetermined".
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