I Have Landed (33 page)

The title page of an early treatise on syphilis and the ineffective “remedies” then touted
.

Fracastoro wrote these first two parts in the early 1510s and apparently intended to publish them alone. But by the 1520s, a new (and ultimately ineffective) “wonder cure” had emerged, and Fracastoro therefore added a third part to describe the new remedy in the same mythic form previously applied to mercury—the same basic plot, but this time with a shepherd named Syphilus in place of the hunter Ilceus. And thus, with thanks to readers for their patience, we finally come to Fracastoro's reason and motives for naming syphilis. (An excellent article by R. A. Anselment supplied these details of Fracastoro's composition: “Fracastoro's Syphilis: Nahum Tate and the realms of Apollo,”
Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 73
[1991]: 105–18.)

Fracastoro's derivation of his shepherd's name has never been fully resolved (although much debated), but most scholars regard syphilis (often spelled Syphilus) as a medieval form of Sipylus, a son of Niobe in Ovid's
Metamorphosis
—a classical source that would have appealed both to Fracastoro's Renaissance concern for ancient wisdom, and to his abiding interest in natural change. In part 3 of Fracastoro's epic, the sailors of a noble leader (unnamed, but presumably Columbus) find great riches in a new world, but incur the wrath of the sun god by killing his sacred parrots (just as Ilceus had angered the same personage by slaying Diana's deer). Apollo promises horrible retribution in the form of a foul disease—syphilis again. But just as the sailors fall to their knees to beg the sun god's forgiveness, a group of natives arrives—”a race with human shape, but black as jet” in Tate's translation. They also suffer from this disease, but they have come to the grove of birds to perform an annual rite that both recalls the origin of their misfortune and permits them to use the curative power of local botany.

These people, we learn, are the degraded descendants of the race that inhabited the lost isle of Atlantis. They had already suffered enough in losing their ancestral lands and flocks. But a horrendous heat wave then parched their new island and fell with special fury on the king's shepherd:

A shepherd once (distrust not ancient fame)
Possessed these downs, and Syphilus his name.
A thousand heifers in these vales he fed,
A thousand ewes to those fair rivers led . . .
This drought our Syphilus beheld with pain,
Nor could the sufferings of his flock sustain,
But to the noonday sun with upcast eyes,
In rage threw these reproaching blasphemies.

Syphilus cursed the sun, destroyed Apollo's altars, and then decided to start a new religion based on direct worship of his local king, Alcithous. The king, to say the least, approved this new arrangement:

Th'aspiring prince with godlike rites o'erjoyed,
Commands all altars else to be destroyed,
Proclaims himself in earth's low sphere to be
The only and sufficient deity.

Apollo becomes even angrier than before (for Ilceus alone had inspired his wrath in part 2)—and he now inflicts the disease upon everyone, but first upon Syphilus who gains eternal notoriety as namebearer thereby:

Th'all-seeing sun no longer could sustain
These practices, but with engaged disdain
Darts forth such pestilent malignant beams,
As shed infection on air, earth and streams;
From whence this malady its birth received,
And first th'offending Syphilus was grieved . . .
He first wore buboes dreadful to the sight,
First felt strange pains and sleepless passed the night;
From him the malady received its name,
The neighboring shepherds caught the spreading flame:
At last in city and in court ‘twas known,
And seized th'ambitious monarch on his throne.

A shepherd or two could be spared, but the suffering of kings demands surcease. The high priest therefore suggests a human sacrifice to assuage the wrath of Apollo (now given his Greek name of Phoebus)—and guess whom they choose? But fortunately the goddess Juno decides to spare the unfortunate shepherd, and to make a substitution in obvious parallel to the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac:

On Syphilus the dreadful lot did fall,
Who now was placed before the altar bound
His head with sacrificial garlands crowned,
His throat laid open to the lifted knife,
But interceding Juno spared his life,
Commands them in his stead a heifer slay,
For Phoebus's rage was now removed away.

Ever since then, these natives, the former inhabitants of Atlantis, perform an annual rite of sacrifice to memorialize the hubris of Syphilus and the salvation of the people by repentance. The natives still suffer from syphilis, but their annual rites of sacrifice please Juno, who, in return, allows a wondrous local cure, the guaiacum tree, to grow on their isle alone. The Spanish sailors, now also infected by the disease, learn about the new cure—ever so much more tolerable than mercury—and bring guaiacum back to Europe.

Thus the imprecation heaped upon Spain by calling syphilis “the Spanish disease” becomes doubly unfair. Not only should the Spaniards be absolved for importation (because the disease struck Europe all at once, and from a latent contagion that originated well before any ships reached the New World); but the same Spanish sailors, encountering a longer history of infection and treatment in the New World, had discovered a truly beneficent remedy.

Most people know about the former use of mercury in treating syphilis, for the substance had some benefit, and the remedy endured for centuries. But the guaiacum cure has faded to a historical footnote because, in a word, this magical New World potion flopped completely. (Paracelsus himself had branded guaiacum as useless by 1530, the year of Fracastoro's publication.) But Fracastoro devised his myth of Syphilus in the short period of euphoria about the power of the new nostrum. The treatment failed, but the name stuck.

We should not be surprised to learn that Fracastoro's attraction to guaiacum owed as much to politics as to scientific hope. The powerful Fugger family, the great bankers of German lands, had lent vast sums to Maximilian's grandson Charles V in his successful bid to swing election as Holy Roman Emperor over his (and Fracastoro's) arch-enemy, Francis I of France. Among the many repayments necessitated by Charles's debt, the Fuggers won a royal monopoly for importing guaiacum to Europe. (The Habsburg Charles V also controlled Spain and, consequently, all shipping to Hispaniola, where the guaiacum tree grew.) In fact, the Fuggers built a chain of hospitals for the treatment of syphilis with guaiacum. Fracastoro's allegiances, for reasons previously discussed, lay with Charles V and the Spanish connection—so his tale of the shepherd Syphilus and the discovery of guaiacum suited his larger concerns as well. (Guaiacum, also known as
lignum vitae
or
lignum sanctum
[wood of life, or holy wood] has some medicinal worth, although not for treating syphilis. As an
extremely hard wood, of the quality of ebony, guaiacum also has value in building and decoration.)

Fracastoro did proceed beyond his politically motivated poetry to learn more about syphilis. In the later work that secured his enduring fame (but largely for the wrong reason)—his
De contagione et contagiosis mortis et curatione
(on contagion and contagious diseases and their cure) of 1546—Fracastoro finally recognized the venereal nature of syphilis, writing that infection occurs
“verum non ex omni contactu, neque prompte, sed turn solum, quum duo corpora contactu mutuo plurimum incalvissent, quod praecipue in coitu eveniebat”
(truly not from all contact, nor easily, but only when two bodies join in most intense mutual contact, as primarily occurs in coitus). Fracastoro also recognized that infected mothers could pass the disease to their children, either at birth or through suckling.

Treating himself diplomatically and in the third person, Fracastoro admitted and excused the follies of his previous poem, written
quum iuniores essemus
(when we were younger). In this later prose work of 1546, Fracastoro accurately describes both the modes of transmission and the three temporal stages of symptoms—the small, untroublesome (and often overlooked) genital sore in the primary stage; the secondary stage of lesions and aches, occurring several months later; and the dreaded tertiary stage, developing months to years later, and leading to death by destruction of the heart or brain (called
paresis
, or paralysis accompanied by dementia) in the worst cases.

In the hagiographical tradition still all too common in textbook accounts of the history of science, Fracastoro has been called the “father” of the germ theory of disease for his sensitive and accurate characterization, in this work, of three styles of contagion: by direct contact (as for syphilis), by transmission from contaminated objects, and at a distance through transport by air. Fracastoro discusses particles of contagion
ox semina
(seeds), but this term, taken from ancient Greek medicine, carries no connotation of an organic nature or origin. Fracastoro does offer many speculations about the nature of contagious
semina
—but he never mentions microorganisms, a hypothesis that could scarcely be imagined more than a century before the invention of the microscope.

In fact, Fracastoro continues to argue that the infecting
semina
of syphilis may arise from poisonous emanations sparked by planetary conjunctions. He even invokes a linguistic parallel between transmission of syphilis by sexual contact
(coitus)
, and the production of bad seeds by planetary overlap in the sky, for he describes the astronomical phenomenon with the same word as
“coitum et conventum syderum”
(the coitus and conjunction of stars), particularly, for
syphilis,
“nostra trium superiorum, Saturni, Iovis et Martis”
(our three most distant bodies, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars).

Nonetheless, we seem to need heroes, defined as courageous iconoclasts who discerned germs of modern truth (literal “germs” in this case) through strictures of ancient superstition—and Fracastoro therefore wins false accolades under our cultural myth of clairvoyance “ahead of his time,” followed by rejection and later rediscovery, long after death and well beyond hope of earthly reward. For example, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
entry on Fracastoro ends by proclaiming:

But Fracastoro deserves our warmest praise for his brilliance and compassion
within
the beliefs of his own time. We can only appreciate his genius when we understand the features of his work that strike us as most odd by current reckonings—particularly his choice of Latin epic poetry to describe syphilis, and his christening of the disease for a mythical shepherd whose suffering also reflected Fracastoro's political needs and beliefs. In his article on Fracastoro for the
Dictionary of Scientific Biography
, Bruno Zanobio gives a far more accurate description, properly rooted in sixteenth-century knowledge, for Fracastoro's concept of contagious seeds:

A good description, to be sure, but not buttressed by any hint that these
semina
might be living microorganisms. “Undoubtedly,” Zanobio continues, “the
seminaria
derive from Democritean atomism via the
semina
of Lucretius and the gnostic and Neoplatonic speculations renewed by Saint Augustine and
Saint Bonaventura.” Fracastoro, in short, remained true to his Renaissance conviction that answers must be sought in the wisdom of classical antiquity.

Fracastoro surely probed the limits of his time, but medicine, in general, made very little progress in controlling syphilis until the twentieth century. Guaiacum failed and mercury remained both minimally effective and maximally miserable. (We need only recall Erasmus's sardonic quip that, in exchange for a night with Venus, one must spend a month with Mercury.) Moreover, since more than 50 percent of people infected with the spirochete never develop symptoms of the dreaded third stage, the disease, if left untreated, effectively “cures” itself in a majority of cases (although spirochetes remain in the body). Thus one can argue that traditional medicine usually did far more harm than good—a common situation, recalling Benjamin Franklin's quip that, although Dr. Mesmer was surely a fraud, his ministrations should be regarded as benevolent because people who followed his “cures” by inducing “animal magnetism” didn't visit “real” physicians, thereby sparing themselves such useless and harmful remedies as bleeding and purging.