Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by spirochetes. It begins with a chancre, moves to a kind of chicken pox of the palms and soles, and eventually moves to the brain. It can have all kinds of weird symptoms and is referred to as the great mimicker.
Some of the worst include rotting skin. For real. Take a minute and google “syphilis nose,” click images. Not while your kids are around though.
It is a nasty, nasty bug, and it makes you gross until it makes you crazy and then you die.
Of course, initially it was assumed that God was punishing you for having sex.
So what happened was no one talked about it. Everyone tried to cover it up if you had it. Some material I’ve been reading lately seems pretty clear. Pretty much everyone from 1400 until there early 1900’s had syphilis. Why the early 1900’s? Penicillin solved the problem. Thank you, Dr. Fleming.
Back tracking through history, it’s a little difficult to find hard evidence that people had syphilis. Think about even today when they aren’t stoning people for adultery. You get chlamydia? You don’t really tell everyone. The president tests positive for HIV? I don’t think it’s making its way into the news.
In addition, no one wants to uncover that their hero had syphilis. No one in the hero’s family wants people to know. So their records are a little hard to find and prove. In some cases, there are medical records of treatments like mercury that are known to only have been used to treat syphilis.
In other cases, there are obvious deformities both physical and mental that point to syphilis.
In some cases, friends’ memories briefly mention the disease. It’s hard to track down but here is a brief list of the more obvious cases:
• Christopher Columbus – It’s thought that the disease spread to the world thanks to Columbus and his crew bringing it back from the Americas.
• Franz Schubert
• Adolph Hitler
• Mussolini
• Leo Tolstoy
• George Washington
• Abraham Lincoln
• Napoleon Bonaparte
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Al Capone
• Howard Hughes
• Vincent Van Gogh and his brother
• Oscar Wilde
• Vladimir Lenin
Wow!
What a list of names eh?
I was blown away by this. I also think If I had seen some of those pictures and heard the story while in PA school that I never would forget about syphilis and how it’s treated.
If you want to remember more about syphilis and hundreds of other diseases, check out The Final Step. It’s designed to help you remember things that you can’t remember.
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Enjoy and thank you for being part of the community and spreading the word about the work that we do.
Brian Wallace
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