AN ANCIENT DISEASE: Two syphilis patients, a woman in bed and a man sitting on a stool, both covered with lesions, are depicted in this woodcut from 1497, just three years after the disease spread across Europe for the first time. A physician holds up a flask of the woman’s urine that has been sampled for analysis, while another applies a mercury-containing salve to the man’s legs—a treatment that was often said to be worse than the disease.© SCIENCE SOURCE/COLORIZATION BY JESSICA WILSON
By the close of the 15th century, chaos reigned in Naples, Italy. At the invitation of Pope Innocent VIII, the French King Charles VIII invaded the city with 25,000 troops. Soon after, a terrible new disease appeared among the soldiers and the prostitutes who accompanied them. Boils as big as acorns that burst and left scabs, terrible joint pain, rotting flesh, and a revolting odor tortured the infected. By the dawn of the 20th century, it was estimated that as many as 10 percent of London residents, 15 percent of Parisians, and 20 percent of US army recruits had the disease—dubbed syphilis after the hero of a 16th-century poem who is afflicted with the infection as a punishment for insulting the god Apollo.
The pale, ...
