Shortly after Christopher Columbus and his sailors returned from their voyage to the New World, a horrifying new disease
began to make its way around the Old. The pox, as it was often called, erupted with dramatic severity. Ulrich von Hutten, a German knight, revolutionary, and author who wrote a popular book about his own trials with syphilis and the treatments he underwent, the first European sufferers were covered with acorn-sized boils that emitted a foul, dark green pus. This secretion was so vile, von Hutten affirmed, that even the burning pains of the boils troubled the sick less than their horror at the sight of their own bodies. Yet this was only the beginning. People's flesh and skin filled with water; their bladders developed sores; their stomachs were eaten away. Girolamo Fracastoro, a professor at the University of Padua, described the onward march of symptoms: syphilis pustules developed into ulcers that dissolved skin, muscle, bone, palate, and tonsils—even lips, noses, eyes, and genital organs. Rubbery tumors, filled with a white, sticky mucus, grew to the size of rolls of bread. Violent pains tormented the afflicted, who were exhausted but could not sleep, and suffered starvation without feeling hunger. Many of them died.
The public was appalled by this scourge. Physicians too, von Hutten reported, were so revolted that they would not even touch their
patients. As in the earlier Middle Ages, divines quickly
announced that the extraordinary sins of the age were responsible for the new plague; others blamed the stars, miasmas, and various other causes. Barrels of medical ink were spilled on the question of where the disease had come from. Treatments, preventions, and cures were sought. The idea of infection began to be taken far more seriously than it ever had before. Hospitals transformed themselves in response to the new plague sometimes for the better, but often for the worse, as when, in fear, they cast their ulcerated patients out into the streets. Most of all, people continued to follow their old ways: in the face of this new threat, they castigated and persecuted the sick. As infection spread, so did fear; and where fear went, blame followed close behind.
Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived when it struck America in the 1980s. Syphilitics were condemned from pulpits and from chairs in university medical schools. John Calvin announced that "God has raised up new diseases against debauchery"; medical authorities willingly agreed. The greatest English surgeon of the sixteenth century, William Clowes, who counted Queen Elizabeth among his patients, announced to his colleagues and patients that syphilis was "loathsome and odious, yea troublesome and dangerous, a notable testimony of the just wrath of God." A century later, a French physician, M. Flamand, summed up this point of view concisely by announcing that venereal diseases were the just rewards of unbridled lust.Disease commonly invited theological speculation, but in the case of syphilis people felt that little speculation was necessary. Just as fornication opened the door to the pox, so the pox opened the door to chastisement and blame.