![]() ![]() However, by the end of the century the earlier, fulminant form of the disease yielded to milder strains, displaying less florid symptoms and at the same time natural resistance to the organism increased in the affected populations. The most frightening and lurid account of these early symptoms is to be found in the Libellus Josephi Grunpecki (1503) this, one of the most terrible texts we have from the period, is the work of a German canon who caught the infection in Italy. In its later tertiary stage it could lead to madness and death (often by a blow-out of the aorta, the main artery leading from the heart). Although its overall demographic effect was not very great, its loathsome and conspicuous symptoms (chancres, pustules, skin eruptions, leg ulcers) caused alarm. There are, of course, no reliable contemporary statistics to show the initially explosive spread of the epidemic in the West where, as a new virus, it encountered no natural innoculation in the bodies it invaded. These mercenaries, in turn, spread the virus across Italy and later still carried it back along their lines of retreat, sowing the scourge widely across Europe where it propagated itself in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression. Las Casas believed that these innocent carriers of the germ helped to spread the infection probably by frequenting Spanish prostitutes, some of whom were camp-followers of the forces raised by the French king, Charles VIII, for his attack on Naples in the following year. Moreover, Las Casas also points to the six natives brought to Spain by Columbus from that first voyage. ![]() ![]() In any case, his ship the Nina was not the only vessel to return, and Ruy Diaz de Isla gives evidence that he was called to attend victims on board the second ship, the Pinta (one of whose pilots died soon after arrival), and that he witnessed the spread of the disease in Barcelona, where it caused a wave of public prayers and penances. ![]() But he was writing for the pious eyes of his patron, Queen Isabel, and all his early reports read like tourist promotion literature: it was not his purpose to draw attention to the aloes all must be honey. And there is plenty of evidence that any Spaniard who was unchaste while there caught the infection: indeed scarcely one in a hundred escaped its terrible and continual torments.Ĭolumbus, it is true, declared that his crew returned to Spain 'wonderfully fit and healthy'. I repeatedly questioned the natives who confirmed that the disease was endemic in Hispaniola. Yet three separate, independent, reliable and contemporary authorities declared the disease was American: Fernandez de Oviedo, a pioneer in the New World and official chronicler of the Indies Friar Bartolome de Las Casas, a missionary veteran and Dr Ruy Diaz de Isla, the celebrated specialist. Although the thesis fits the chronology, not everyone accepts it. Most medical historians agree on the New World origin of the virus which, like 'America', has a dateable beginning, for it appeared in Europe when Columbus returned from his first voyage (1493). The Europeans who took smallpox into the New World brought home the great pox, syphilis, the only disease to be named after a Renaissance Latin poem. The New Eden had a serpent too, and Columbus brought home more than treasure: 'There were', wrote Fallopius, 'aloes hidden in that honey'. The effects of smallpox alone in early America have been compared to those of the Black Death in Europe, for the genetically-virgin peoples of the vast and hitherto isolated continent of the New World were helpless before the invaders' viruses.Īmerica, however, exacted revenge for the invasion of the western paradise. In the sixteenth century European-borne diseases contributed to the collapse of the two great Amerindian civilisations. Pliny began to wonder what could have so angered the gods as to make them want to add one more to the three hundred diseases already afflicting humanity.Ĭontact with the East, then, had its dangers, but so too had contact with the West. 'Chin Gout' required drastic measures: the flesh was burnt down to the bone with caustic which left a scar almost as disfiguring as the disease itself. He concluded this must be because of their custom of kissing each other in greeting. This, a scaly facial eruption, jokingly called 'Chin Gout' (Mentagra) by those not afflicted with it, puzzled Pliny, not least because it chose its victims from one special stratum of society: women and the lower orders were immune, noblemen alone suffered from it. Pliny the Elder noted that exploration, expansion and empire brought problems as well as novelties in their wake and, discussing new diseases in particular (Natural History), he commented on one complaint brought home by a Roman knight after service in Asia Minor. ![]()
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