syphilis

In 1530, the Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro published a Latin poem in Verona titled Syphilis sive morbus gallicus, which translates as Syphilis or the French Disease. The poem's protagonist, a shepherd named Syphilus, defied the god Apollo and was cursed with a wasting sickness as punishment. Fracastoro invented the name Syphilus for his character, probably drawing on Greek elements meaning something like pig-lover, from sus (pig) and philos (loving), though others point to an Ovidian character named Sipylus. Whatever the derivation, the name was Fracastoro's invention before it was medicine's.

The disease itself had spread across Europe with alarming speed after 1493, when sailors returning from Columbus's first voyage carried it back to Spain. Within two years it had reached Italy, and by 1497 it was documented in Scotland. Each nation assigned blame to another: the French called it the Italian sickness, the Italians called it the French sickness, the English called it the French pox. The epidemic traveled faster than any agreement on what to name it.

Fracastoro's poem gave the outbreak a name that eventually prevailed. He described symptoms, proposed mercury as a treatment, and argued that the disease had originated in the Americas. His poetic diagnosis was wrong in its mechanism but correct in its geography. He was among the first Europeans to assert clearly that this new plague had arrived from the New World.

The medical term syphilis entered formal professional use in the 18th century as physicians sought a neutral word free of national blame. In 1905, Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann in Berlin identified the causative bacterium as Treponema pallidum, and the diagnosis became permanent. The shepherd's name had traveled from a Renaissance poem into every pharmacopoeia on earth.