I Have Landed (32 page)

W
E
USUALLY MANAGE TO CONFINE OUR APPETITE FOR
mutual recrimination to merely petty or mildly amusing taunts. Among English speakers, unannounced departures (especially with bills left unpaid), or military absences without permission, go by the epithet of “taking French leave.” But a Frenchman calls the same, presumably universal, human tendency
s'en filer à I'Anglaise
, or “taking English leave.” I learned, during an undergraduate year in England, that the condoms I had bought (for no realized purpose, alas) were “French letters” to my fellow students. In France that summer, my fellow students of another nation called the same item a
chapeau Anglais
, or “English hat.”

But this form of pettiness can escalate to danger. Names and symbols enflame us, and wars have been fought over flags or soccer matches. Thus, when syphilis first began to ravage Europe in the
1480s or 1490s (the distinction, as we shall see, becomes crucial), a debate erupted about naming rights for this novel plague—that is, the right to name the disease for your enemies. The first major outbreak had occurred in Naples in the mid 1490s, so the plague became, for some, the Italian or the Neapolitan disease. According to one popular theory, still under debate in fact, syphilis had arrived from the New World, brought back by Columbus's sailors who had pursued the usual activities in novel places—hence the Spanish disease. The plague had been sufficiently acute a bit northeast of Columbus's site of return—hence the German disease. In the most popular moniker of all, for this nation maintained an impressive supply of enemies, syphilis became the French disease
(morbus Gallicus
in contemporary medical publications, usually written in Latin), with blame cast upon the troops of the young French king, Charles VIII, who had conquered Naples, where the disease first reached epidemic proportions, in 1495. Supporters of this theory then blamed the spread through the rest of Europe upon the activities of Charles's large corps of mercenary soldiers who, upon demobilization, fanned out to their homes all over the continent.

I first encountered this debate in a succinct summary written by Ludovico Moscardo, who described potential herbal remedies in the catalog of his museum, published in 1682:
“Ne sapendo, a chi dar la colpa, li spagnuoli lo chiamorono mal Francese, li Francesi mal Napolitano, e li Tedeschi, mal Spagnuolo”
(not knowing whom to blame, the Spaniards call it the French disease, the French the Neapolitan disease, and the Germans the Spanish disease). Moscardo then adds that other people, citing no specific human agent, attribute the origins of syphilis to bad airs generated by a conjunction of the three most distant planets, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, in the nighttime sky.

How, then, did the new plague receive its universal modern appellation of syphilis; and what does syphilis mean, anyway? The peculiar and fascinating tale of the name's origin can help us to understand two key principles of intellectual life that may seem contradictory at first, but that must be amalgamated into a coherent picture if we hope to appreciate both the theories of our forebears and the power of science to overcome past error: first, that the apparently foolish concepts of early scientists made sense in their times and can therefore teach us to respect their struggles; and, second, that those older beliefs were truly erroneous, and that science both progresses, in any meaningful sense of the term, and holds immense promise for human benefit through correction of error and discovery of genuine natural truths.

Syphilis, the proper name of a fictional shepherd, entered our language in a long poem, 1,300 verses in elegant Latin hexameter, written in 1530 by the greatest physician of his generation (and my second-favorite character of the
time, after Leonardo da Vinci)—a gentleman from Verona (also the home of Romeo and Juliet), Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1553). Fracastoro dabbled in astronomy (becoming friendly with Copernicus when both studied medicine at Padua in 1501), made some crucial geological observations about the nature of fossils, wrote dense philosophical treatises and long classical poems, and held high status as the most celebrated physician of his time. (In his role as papal doctor, for example, he supervised the transfer of the Council of Trent to Bologna in 1547, both to honor His Holiness's political preferences and to avoid a threatened epidemic.) In short, a Renaissance man of the Renaissance itself.

I cannot imagine a starker contrast—my original inspiration for writing this essay, by the way—between Fracastoro's christening of 1530 and the sequencing of the genome of
Treponema pallidum
, the bacterial spirochete that truly causes syphilis, in 1998. Fracastoro could not resolve the origins of syphilis and didn't even recognize its venereal mode of transmission at first. So he wrote a poem and devised a myth, naming syphilis therein to honor a fictional shepherd of his own invention. In greatest contrast, the sober paper, published in
Science
magazine (July 17, 1998) in an article with thirty-three coauthors, resolves the 1,138,006 base pairs, arranged in a sequence of 1,041 genes, in the genome of
T. pallidum
, the undoubted biological cause of syphilis.

Fracastoro's shepherd may have ended an acrimonious debate by donating his neutral name, but Fracastoro himself, as a Veronese patriot, made his own allegiances clear in the full title of his epic poem:
Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus
—“Syphilis, or the French Disease.” To epitomize some horrendous complexities of local politics: Verona had long been controlled by the more powerful neighboring city of Venice. Italy did not yet exist as a nation, and the separate kingdom of Naples maintained no formal tie to Venice. But commonalities of language and interest led the citizens of Verona to side with Naples against the invading French forces of Charles VIII, while general French designs on Italian territory prompted nearly a half-century of war, and strong Italian enmity, following Charles's temporary occupation of Naples.

Meanwhile, Maximilian I, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor (a largely German confederation in central Europe, despite the name), added Spain to his extensive holdings by marrying both his son and daughter to Spanish rulers. He also allied himself with the Pope, Venice, and Spain to drive Charles VIII out of Italy. Ten years later, given the shifting alliances of
Realpolitik
, Maximilian had made peace with France and even sought their aid to wage war on Venice. His successful campaign split Venetian holdings, and Maximilian occupied Fracastoro's city of Verona from 1509 until 1517, when control reverted to Venice by treaty.

Fracastoro had fled the territory to escape Maximilian's war with Venice. But he returned in 1509, and began to prosper both immediately and mightily—so I assume that his allegiances lay with Maximilian. But, to shorten the tale and come to the relevant point, Maximilian (at least most of the time) controlled Spain and regarded France as his major enemy. Fracastoro, as a Veronese patriot and supporter of Maximilian, also despised the French presence and pretensions. Fracastoro's interest therefore lay with absolving Spain for the European spread of syphilis by denying the popular theory that Columbus's men had inadvertently imported the “Spanish disease” with their other spoils from the New World. Hence, for Fracastoro, his newly christened syphilis would carry the subtitle
of Morbus Gallicus
.

I can't boast nearly enough Latin to appreciate Fracastoro's literary nuances, but experts then and now have heaped praise upon his Virgilian style. J. C. Scaliger, perhaps the greatest scholar of Fracastoro's generation, lauded the work as “a divine poem”; and Geoffrey Etough, the major translator of our time, writes that “even Fracastoro's rivals acclaimed him second only to Virgil.” In this essay, I will use Nahum Tate's English version of 1686, the first complete translation ever made into any other language, and a highly influential work in its own right (despite the clunkiness of Tate's heroic couplets, in utterly unrelieved iambic pentameter). This version remained a standard source for English readers for more than two centuries. Tate, one of England's least celebrated poets laureate (or should we pluralize this title as poet laureates, or even poets laureates?), wrote the libretto for Henry Purcell's short operatic jewel
Dido and Aeneas
. A few devout choristers may also know his texts for “While shepherds watched” or “As pants the hart.” We shall pass by his once popular “adaptation” of
King Lear
, with its happy ending in Cordelia's marriage to Edgar.

Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus
includes three parts, each with its own form and purpose. Part 1 discusses origins and causes, while parts 2 and 3 narrate myths in closely parallel structure, devised to illustrate the two most popular (though, in retrospect, not particularly effective) cures. Fracastoro begins by defending his choice of
morbus Gallicus:

. . . To Naples first it came
From France, and justly took from France his name
Companion from the war. . . .

He then considers the theory of New World transmission on Spanish ships and admits the tragic irony, if true:

If then by Traffick thence this plague was brought
How dearly dearly was that Traffick bought!

But Spanish shipping cannot be blamed, Fracastoro holds, because the disease appeared too quickly and in too many places (including areas that had never received products from the New World) to validate a single point of origin:

Some instances in divers lands are shown
To whom all Indian Traffick is unknown
Nor could th'infection from the Western Clime
Seize distant nations at the self same time.

Spain must therefore be absolved:

Nor can th'infection first be charged on Spain
That sought new worlds beyond the Western main.
Since from Pyrene's foot, to Italy
It shed its bane on France, While Spain was free . . .
From whence 'tis plain this Pest must be assigned
To some more pow'rful cause and hard to find.

The remainder of part 1 presents Fracastoro's general view of nature as complex and puzzling, but intelligible—thereby giving us fascinating insight into the attitudes of Renaissance humanism, an approach that tried to break through the strictures of scholastic logical analysis to recover the presumed wisdom of classical times (renaissance means “rebirth”), but had not developed the belief in primacy of empirical documentation that would characterize the rise of modern science more than a century later. Fracastoro tells us that we must not view syphilis as divine retribution for human malfeasance (a popular theory at the time), a plague that must be endured but cannot, as a departure from nature's usual course, be comprehended.

Rather, syphilis has a natural cause that can, in principle, be understood. But nature is far more complex, and unattuned to human sensibilities, than we had been willing to admit, and explanation will not come easily—for nature works in strange ways, and at scales far from our easy perception. For example, Fracastoro argues, syphilis probably had no single point of origin followed by later spread (thus absolving Spain once again). Its particles of contagion (whatever they may be) must be carried by air, but may remain latent for centuries before breaking out. Thus the plague of any moment may emerge from causes
set long before. Moreover, certain potent causes—planetary conjunctions, for example, that may send poisonous emanations to earth—remain far from our potential observation or understanding. In any case, and on a note of hope, Fracastoro depicts plagues as comprehensible phenomena of complex nature. And just as they ravage us with sudden and unanticipated fury, the fostering conditions will change in time, and our distress shall lift:

Since nature's then so liable to change
Why should we think this late contagion strange? . . .
The offices of nature to define
And to each cause a true effect assign
Must be a task both hard and doubtful too . . .
[But] nature always to herself is true.

Part 2 continues the central theme of natural causation and potential alleviation, but in a very different manner. Fracastoro, following traditions of Latin epic poetry, now constructs a myth to illustrate both the dangers of human hubris and the power of salvation through knowledge. He begins by giving the usual sage advice about alleviation via good living: lots of vigorous exercise, healthy and frugal diet, and no sex. (This regimen, addressed to males alone, proscribes sex only as a strain upon bodily energy, not as a source of infection—for Fracastoro did not yet understand the venereal transmission of syphilis.) But the cure also requires pharmacological aid. Fracastoro upheld the traditional Galenic theory of humors and regarded all disease, including syphilis, as a disharmony among essential components—an imbalance that must be restored by such measures as bleeding, sweating, and purging:

At first approach of Spring, I would advise,
Or ev'n in Autumn months if strength suffice,
to bleed your patient in the regal vein,
And by degrees th'infected current drain.

Part 2 then extols the virtues of mercury as a cure in this context. Mercury can, in fact, retard the spread of the syphilis spirochete; but Fracastoro interpreted its benefits only in terms of humoral rebalancing, and the purging of poisons—for mercury plasters induced sweating, while ingestion encouraged copious spitting. The treatment, he admitted, can only be called unpleasant in the extreme, but ever so preferable to the dementia, paralysis, and death imposed by syphilis in the final stages of worst cases:

Nor let the foulness of the course displease.
Obscene indeed, but less than your disease . . .
The mass of humors now dissolved within,
To purge themselves by spittle shall begin,
Till you with wonder at your feet shall see,
A tide of filth, and bless the remedy.

Finally, Fracastoro spins his myth about human hubris, repentance, and the discovery of mercury. A hunter named Ilceus kills one of Diana's sacred deer. Apollo, Diana's brother, becomes royally infuriated and inflicts the pox of syphilis upon poor Ilceus. But the contrite hunter prays mightily and sincerely for relief, and the goddess Callirhoe, feeling pity, carries Ilceus underground far from the reach of the sun god's continuing wrath. There, in the realms of mineralogy, Ilceus discovers the curative power of mercury.