Syphilis, 1494–1923
Syphilis, 1494–1923
Des Inoculations Syphilitiques. From the holdings of Center for the History of Medicine/Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine—Harvard Medical School.
Syphilis was first reported in Europe in 1494 among soldiers (and their camp followers) involved in a war between France and Naples. The disease was striking in two ways: for its unpleasantness and for its status as a new disease, unknown to the ancient medical authorities. Syphilis would remain a significant social and medical problem through the mid-20th century.
The “French Disease”
Until the 19th century, syphilis was known by many different names, but the most common was the “French Disease.” (The French called it the “Neopolitan disease,” in a pattern that would repeat itself elsewhere. Russians, for instance, sometimes called it the “Polish disease.”)
Origins
Syphilis is generally believed to have come originally from the New World, imported into Europe by Christopher Columbus’s sailors after their famous voyage of 1492. Two important early experiences with syphilis are recorded in Grunpeck’s ca. 1496 Tractatus de pestilentiali scorra sive male de Franzos (also available in the vernacular German, and Ulrich von Hutten’s ca. 1519, Of the vvood called guaiacum, that healeth the Frenche pockes. Fracastoro is credited with naming the disease in his 1530 poem, “Syphilis.”
The sexual nature of syphilis transmission and its contagiousness was noticed from the start. In Europe and the United States, the disease has long been connected with questions of morality, both individual and societal. Women were often assumed to be the source of infection, and, in the 19th century, the regulation of prostitution in order to control the spread of venereal disease became a priority in many European countries. England’s Contagious Diseases Acts are an example of this. Social hygiene—the attempt to regulate and control disease-causing behavior, especially that related to venereal disease, though moral self-discipline and legislation—was of great importance in the late 19th and early 20th century United States as well.
Diagnosis
Before the Wasserman blood test—the first widely used serum diagnosis test for syphilis—was developed in 1906, diagnosing syphilis relied on the evaluation of visible symptoms like lesions, rashes, and chancres. Regulated prostitutes were sometimes examined every few days. Though it could produce false positives and though performing the test required great skill on the part of the laboratory technician, the Wasserman test affected both the social and the medical understanding of syphilis, because it could reveal the disease at the asymptomatic stage. This meant that a syphilitic might be a person with no current outward manifestation of disease who could have or spread syphilis without realizing it.
Treatments: Mercury, “Syphilization,” and Salvarsan
Effective treatment for syphilis was controversial because of the perception that a widely available cure would increase “immoral” behavior.
Until the early 20th century, the primary treatment for syphilis was mercury, in the form of calomel, ointments, steam baths, pills, and other concoctions. Side effects of mercury treatments could include tooth loss; mouth, throat, and skin ulcerations; neurological damage; and death.
Guaiacum, a New World tree, was the source of another early treatment for syphilis used in the 16th century. Numerous patent medicines were also developed, especially in the 19th century, often with euphemistic names and advertising.
“Syphilization”
In the mid–19th century, European physicians conducted experiments in “syphilization”, often on hospitalized prostitutes. “Syphilization” was the name given to repeated inoculations with syphilis matter in order to “saturate” the subject, on the theory that the larger the number of visible, or “primary,” lesions, the less likely it was that secondary syphilis would develop.
“Syphilization” was also used as a preventative, analogous to smallpox inoculation.
Salvarsan
The syphilis spirochete organism, a bacterium, was discovered in 1905. In 1908, Sahachiro Hata, working in Paul Ehrlich’s laboratory, discovered the arsenic compound arsphenamine that became known after 1910 by its brand name, Salvarsan. It was also known as “606” because it was the 606th compound Hata and Ehrlich tested. Salvarsan was the first effective specific chemotherapy against syphilis, although it could involve an extended series of treatments and cause serious side effects.
Selected Contagion Resources
This is a partial list of digitized materials available in Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics. For additional materials on the topic “Syphilis, 1494–1923,” click here or search the collection’s Catalog and Full Text databases.