This disgusting, but hardly pornographic, illustration of a monk with open lesions on his penis is illustrative of the horrific pandemic of Syphilis that emerged in Europe in the late 15th century. Causing sores on genitalia in its first phase, the disease eventually results in ulcers, hair loss, and physical dismemberment among other things before the sufferer dies.
Syphilis got its name from an eponymous poem about a shepherd who taunted the sun, who took its revenge by afflicting poor Syphilis with the disease: “the sun went pallid for his righteous wrath/ and germinated poisons in our path./ And he who wrought this outrage was the first/ to feel his body ache, when sore accursed./ And for his ulcers and their torturing,/ No longer would a tossing, hard couch bring/ Him sleep. With joints apart and flesh erased,/ Thus was the shepherd failed and thus debased./ And after him this malady we call/ SYPHILIS . . . .”.
Check out tomorrow’s post to read about the most widely used cure until the 20th century
Source(s): @nyamcenterforhistory.org, _Books, Health, and History the New York Academy of Medicine_, posted April 19, 2013, “Syphilis, or the French Disease,” by Rebecca Pou, citing the 1530 poem by Fracastorius. Image from British Library of John of Arderne’s _Liber Medicarum_, cited in @notchesblog.com, “The Pustulent Penis: Searching for STDs in the Centuries before Syphilis,” by Katherine Harvey, June 2, 2016, _Notches_.
