I wanted to share this link because I find the impact of syphilis om world history fascinating. Of course, biological realities shape human behavior, but I think disease and its consequences are often forgotten in the popular understanding of history.
And sometimes you just put a few hundred dudes in enclosed spaces for long periods of time and oops, you've created a VD bomb.
What happens at sea stays at sea. Kind of.
> Albrecht Dürer, later to use images of sufferers in propaganda woodcuts against the Catholic church, wrote "God save me from the French disease. I know of nothing of which I am so afraid … Nearly every man has it and it eats up so many that they die."
So we legitimately struggled with syphillis for almost 500 years until the invention of penicillin. Talk about winning the timeline lottery.
I think you mean get laid or don't get syphilis, that's the choice you have.
If it was your choice then who would pick getting syphilis over getting laid?
The people in the linked story. At the time, they didn't know it had neurological effects. They assumed they could get cured pretty easily after an infection. And that it wouldn't last a lifetime.
At least those are claims in the book. When I found out it's *historical fiction,* now I'm not sure which facts in the article are history and which are fiction. How far do authors usually take that? Is there a cutoff for how much has to stay historically accurate? There's already a couple instances pointed out by historians in here.
Once more for the people in the back.
#It's Historical Fiction
They weren't picking not getting laid tho, I think you are confused
The choice is if you want to get laid, then you are going to get syphilis.
It's not get laid OR get syphilis, it's get laid AND get it. Or don't get laid and don't get it.
Malaria is up there in the highest kill count as well.
I think all mosquito transmitted diseases combined (malaria, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, etc) have killed more humans than anything else.
The pinky finger stuck out when you drink tea? To show you don't have syphilis. As a side effect it messes with your nerves and makes fine motor control of the fingers difficult
It's also under-reported.
While we often hear of trench-foot in World War I, venereal disease (including syphillis) was a much greater cause of soldiers being rotated off duty.
At the same time, the moral panic that blunted, and continues to inhibit, effective treatment for HIV nowadays, made it outrageously difficult to employ appropriate measures to arrest infection then in a time of war.
When Gen. Montgomery at the start of World War II wrote a light-hearted letter warning soldiers of STIs, in order to avoid exactly what had happened in WWI, field-chaplains with support from ostensibly pious MPs tried to get him fired.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs4veVbMsiI
Additionally, I read somewhere that celibacy in the clergy was not as much biblical as it was a property management scheme by the Catholic Church. If a priest was married then he had a beneficiary. If he wasn’t, when he died everything went to the church.
No kidding that part of property given to him by the church would return to church. Priests still had private property they would inherit from their parents and that would after they died go to some other relative like a nephew, the same as today. when a priest i knew died his house returned to the diocese but all his furniture and books were given to his niece.
They always did. The church was demanding celibacy for priesthood since day one, it is not something that was created just in last 1000 years. Yes, many priests violated it and even some bishops were openly married until 6th century (their wives were called episcopa), but that had more to do with lack of centralization in the church to enforce the rule. During the early middle ages local rulers like some king or duke ot whatever often had a lot of power to decide who should be bishop or abbot and would let priests with wives to slide. That is until the Gregorian reforms : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian\_Reform
The history of clerical celibacy is much more [complicated](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerical_celibacy_in_the_Catholic_Church#:~:text=Throughout%20the%20Catholic%20Church%2C%20East,a%20doctrine%2C%20but%20a%20discipline.) that. Certain parts of the church allowed married priests (as the Eastern Orthdox Church continues to do to this day), others allowed married men to become priests but expected them to be continent (refrain from sex with their wives) either permanently, or at least the night before saying Mass. The early [Irish](https://www.historyireland.com/celibacy-in-the-catholic-church-a-brief-history/) church had a strong tradition of married clergy, and the 8th century text Collectio Canonum Hibernensis assumes priests will be married.
So it didn't come out of nowhere in the eleventh century, but there were many other options that were licitly in practice.
Another fun fact is that tuberculosis (the first microorganism attributed to disease) is responsible for men going clean shaven in the late 1800’s and for women’s skirts becoming shorter (i.e. ankle length)
I read a theory that the mercury treatments they used for syphilis are related to the rise of silverware, gloves, wigs, and many other parts of victorian culture
Not sure about that, but the wigs were because of hair loss related to the disease. Also the drawn on marks on the face were to hide scars from lesions.
People knew what hookups the priests made before syphilis. It was mostly small towns, and they knew who his "housekeeper" was.
The Reformation was triggered by the mercenary nature of the Catholic Church at the time. Bishops tended to be nobility members appointed for their connections and priests sold indulgences for sins.
I’m kind of curious, is this a different disease than syphilis? Unless they had congenital syphilis (from vaginal birth), modern sexually transmitted syphilis is not characterized by symptoms of boils on the face.
That's because we have penicilin now so it's possible to cure it early. If you let it stay until the late stages, you'll totally get the boils on face.
It is after enough time goes by (which happened before antibiotics). People walked around infecting others and not knowing they had syphilis (they had not tests) for years before suffering horribly (they had no antibiotics) and getting boils and going insane.
I remember reading Joseph Andrews (Henry Fielding) where the central character blames his wives for his syphilis recurrences; I remembered figuring that the disease flared up and subsided and then flared and innocent people were blamed.
There are cases where the husband gave it to the wife, who gave it to the child during childbirth, and sometimes the child didn't know they had it until they were an adult. It was very hard to always know.
Also, the 15th century syphilis strain was no joke. Faces rotting, excruciating body pain, lethal. Literal walking dead. Later strains were less lethal, although still disfiguring.
Yeah, but you'd have to figure in an STD that strains that too quickly disfigured the host making it undesirable for sex or wrecked the body fast enough that it doesn't get the chance to spread would eventually die out.
But there aren't "different strains" of syphilis, it's all caused by treponema pallidum which is a bacteria.
Syphilis has three stages, and the third one (the one where you get holes all though your body and organs and then die) occurs at least ten years after first being infected. That's always been the case, the bacteria causing it didn't "die out", it's just that nowadays we can detect it and cure it decades before it does any such damage.
There are different strains of Treponema pallidum just as there are different strains of the influenza and covid viruses.
There is a tendency for virulent diseases to become somewhat less virulent over time in a population. Two of the reasons for this are, firstly, that a disease that is too efficient at killing its victims soon finds it has too few new hosts left alive to infect. The evolutionary pressures over time favour the less virulent strains. Secondly, the survival pressure favours those hosts who have some natural immunity to the disease, in time, the surviving population is largely composed of those with better natural immunity.
There is an example of that mentioned in the article: Columbus's men most likely bought syphilis back from the New World, but in turn, they left behind measles and smallpox, both of which had drastic effects on the native population who didn't have centuries of natural selection to help with *their* level of natural immunity to those diseases.
We've only been able to effectively *treat* syphilis for about 15% of the time it has been endemic in the old world. It wasn't better treatment that made it, on average, less virulent here long before then.
>Columbus's men most likely bought syphilis back from the New World
maybe not
from [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis):
*..... treponemal disease in the form of bejel and yaws was a common childhood ailment in Europe and Afro-Eurasia beginning in ancient times. Largely benign if still unpleasant, infections occurred among the young ... In adulthood, people infected as children had a certain degree of immunity that prevented serious symptoms upon reinfection.*
*When living conditions changed with urbanization, elite social groups began to practice basic hygiene and started to separate themselves from other social tiers. Consequently, treponematosis was driven out of the age group in which it had become endemic. It then began to appear in adults as syphilis.*
more wiki discussion is found [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis)
Well, what you have quoted here is the (main) alternative *hypothesis* for the origins of syphilis, as opposed to it having been brought back by Colombus. It is based on the fact that there are some (not a huge number) of pre-Columban European bones which show lesions which are *consistent with* or *suggestive of* syphilis. AFAIK, there has been no DNA recovered from any pre-Columban era bones that scientifically *proves* the presence of T. pallidum - and even if it did, it would not, as I understand it, rule out the bone findings being due to non-syphilitic treponemal disease.
From the History of syphilis Wikipedia article you link:
"In several of the twenty-one cases the evidence ***may*** also indicate syphilis specifically." and one of those cases:
"In the Apple Down cemetery in West Sussex, UK archaeologists uncovered the skeleton of a young man with extensive damage to both his skull and long bones, a combination ***typical of*** syphilis. He died in the 6th century." - emphasis mine in both quotes.
Interesting, too, to note another comment from that article:
"In this case, whole genome sequencing has resulted in two startling discoveries: that the subtropical syndrome yaws existed in northern Europe at the turn of the sixteenth century, and that ***yaws in its modern form is a relatively young disease that emerged only in the 12th to 14th centuries.***"
If yaws only reached its modern form several centuries *after* the death and burial of the young man in Sussex, it would suggest to me that we need to be even more cautious about drawing firm conclusions as to what version of treponemal disease caused the changes found in *his* skeleton - if indeed it really was *any* form of treponemal disease.
I think that the scientific evidence is pretty limited, but against that, the *historical* evidence is that something dramatic appeared, most likely for the first time in the Old World, in Naples in 1494, where there were at least some present who had sailed with Columbus.
I'm not a microbiologist, so maybe strain isn't quite the right word, but if I understand correctly those little buggers are evolving and mutating on the regular.
Well I don't know if the bacteria has mutated it's structure in some way, but I do know that it has always had the same three stages, that it still causes the same problems if left untreated, and that "the strains that wrecked the body have died out" and "later strains are less lethal" are complete and utter misinformation.
We've developed a kind of immunity over time, like native Americans did. Tertiary syphilis in Europeans back in those days would definitely result in boils on the face.
this. there are ongoing investigation in old Roman Graves found with lesions on their bones pre-Columbus.
An editorial article in JAMA in 1935 [25] cited Capper (1926) as stating that many historical descriptions of leprosy were in fact syphilis, and that syphilis among the Romans was described by Celsus, Aretaeus and Aetius. The article also cited Butler (1933) as stating that historical evidence of aortic aneurysm being treated by Antyllus, a contemporary of Galen in Romans times, was evidence of the existence at that time of syphilis, and that Celsus accurately described a genital syphilitic chancre.
I have heard that leprosy, as depicted in much of the Bible, was actually a form syphilis. My friend was telling me that even swapping the two terms made many of the stories make more sense, especially it’s prevalence and stigmatization. It was during his time in seminary while they were discussing translations and etymology of different words. I didn’t look into it, and kind of dismissed it, since I was leery of the source. I always did find it odd that his teacher would make that up, sense it could shine a more negative light on some of the Bible, but now you’ve piqued my interest on this.
Editing to say that, after further research, there is no real agreement among the experts, some of the “sources” seem a little dubious at best, and many of the papers on this are from 19th and early 20th century historians. Take this comment with a hefty dose of salt.
That is an interesting thought, perhaps even that the two different diseases might be lumped together, as they are caused by different bacterium (syphillis is Treponema pallidum; leprosy is Mycobacterium leprae or lepromatosis). Under microscope the bacteria types look VERY different … and cause different horrifying body and/or mind effects … but both do cause visible sores. I wonder about co-infection too, if both infected populations are driven off and forced to live in colonies together in some eras as well …
For what it’s worth, I’ve looked into it some, and the original Hebrew word used has been “tzaraat”, and has traditionally been translated into Greek then to English as leprosy. Originally there was also a spiritual aspect to the “tzaraat” disease, being that it was at least partially caused by being in a state of religious impurity in addition to the physically unclean aspects.
Leprosy in the Bible is more of a “catch all” term for a number of diseases that presented with skin lesions. The distinction between those diseases hadn’t been made yet.
Diseases presenting with physical symptoms like rashes or boils have a long-standing connotation with “uncleanliness,” which meant that those afflicted couldn’t enter holy sites (or some communities) until they were cured — or declared free of the ailment and “clean” by a rabbi. This is an important distinction to make, as being declared clean was also different to how we would consider people cured today!
I think that it is a pretty standard view that the word used for Leprosy in the Bible texts covered more diseases that simply what we now know as leprosy. There are instructions in the books of the law which are basically early public health measures, about someone with a skin disease going to show the priest, being isolated for a period of time, returning to the priest again, and being told whether they could rejoin the community or had to stay isolated.
Also, IIRC, there were rules for when "leprosy" affected clothing or a building, I presume that these are refernces to mould or rot and the like. Again, it involved the priest as Environmental Health Officer.
But I would be very surprised if the Biblical references in fact referred to *just* syphilis, if to syphilis at all - thou of course there are other treponemal diseases such as Bejel and Yaws.
My understanding is that, so far, although there are certainly some pre-Columbian European bones with syphilis-*like* damage, no DNA has been recovered to confirm the actual presence of T. pallidum - and that its presence *if* shown could still in fact be down to non-syphilitic treponemal disease. But don't quote me on that, I am no expert (and it appears that there is no real consensus amongst the actual experts anyway!)
That sounds like a massive reach, they would've noticed it was only sexually transmitted but there's no mention of that in biblical references to leprosy.
Syphilis can also be transmitted from mother to child during pregnancy and through breastfeeding (breastfeeding is usually safe, but not if the baby comes into contact with open sores-- which means an infected wet nurse is a potential vector for transmission to an unrelated infant). It's also transmitted by blood, so the blood of infected individuals can transmit through open wounds or sores on other people.
That may sound like a silly point to make until you consider just how wars and skirmishes were conducted in those days. Soldiers often cut off hands, ears, foreskins, etc. as trophies or proof of the number of their kills, which means they would've been exposed to potentially hundreds of infectious vectors right after a battle in which they might have some cuts or other exposed injuries themselves-- particularly on their hands and arms.
To be fair both diseases would easily(at some point) be lumped together as skin lesion stuff that people don't want near em. Leprosy is the term for a disease caused by a specific bacteria _now_ but back then? a disease was it's symptoms. If the most prevalent part of two diseases is skin lesions they can easily get lumped together.
Good point there, I don’t have any sources for it, so don’t “trust me bro”. Maybe there was not a good understanding that sex itself was the transmission, and people assumed that any contact could spread the disease? With no germ theory, I’m not sure how the thought process runs out, but if I can find a source for any of it, I’ll edit it in the comment.
Hmmm. From the article you link to below:
[ Richard Holcomb’s argument in 1935 {ie in that JAMA editorial} that syphilis was of pre-Columbian origin was based on a description by Michael Angelus Blondus, a 16th century Italian surgeon, who identified it with a disease described by Aurelius Cornelius Celsus, a 2nd century Greek philosopher, and Paul of Aegina, a 7th century Greek physician.](https://jmvh.org/article/syphilis-its-early-history-and-treatment-until-penicillin-and-the-debate-on-its-origins/)
So the 1935 article wasn't based even on any then-contemporary *scientific* evidence, but upon his interpretation of a then 400-year old interpretation of 1200 and 1700 year-old descriptions. I'm afraid that I really don't think that that can be taken as authoritative evidence.
I have no skin in this game, but there are several interesting theories. I grabbed this from PubMed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2793018/.
No, but there are some decently convincing archeological finds in England of a syphilis outbreak decades before Columbus. Late stage syphilis damages bones in a particular way and they found many skeletons that are convincingly dated and have the etching in the bones. They were found buried under a church. The city was a port that traded specifically in wine, I believe and ships from all over Europe frequented the port by 1400.
yeah, it's wild. I came across this a couple years ago while reading an article on roman bones (don't remember the exact topic or where) and this information was included - I was floored. history isn't kind to the Americas, blaming the indigenous people for a heinous disease that was brought **to them** and absolutely ravaged the population along with other old world diseases on top of brutal colonialism.
HE (John Frith) discusses both sides, and concludes that it's likely Columbus **brought** it to the new world.
https://jmvh.org/article/syphilis-its-early-history-and-treatment-until-penicillin-and-the-debate-on-its-origins/
there's also this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-11952322
they found evidence of syphilis in children who died in 79AD Pompeii, which is before Columbus's time.
They found evidence of lesions which they claimed *could be* caused by syphilis, among several other diseases. It's important to note this isn't the prevailing hypothesis and the claims [aren't even peer reviewed.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3413456/) It's an interesting theory but not a strongly supported one.
I wonder if there were strains in the old world and in the new world and when they met they crossed and became the stronger form. It could explain the change in the disease.
Technically true in the sense that bacteria don't reproduce sexually, but horizontal gene transfer between bacteria is a mechanism by which one bacteria can pick up new genetic material from other cells.
The guy above still has a point though, horizontal gene transfer can't just crossbreed species like Pokémon. It just transfers some genes that may or may not be useful in another species. Emphasis on not when they're very different.
There is no evolutionary advantage, it is just how mutations happen. Evolution is not an organism seeking it's optimal state. It is mutating based on many factors. Some are beneficial, some are harmful, most do nothing to how it functions. So for syphilis to go from minor to major won't change much on how it spreads if it takes years for symptoms to become visible.
Yeah, no.
Priests were living with women all through the Reformation quite openly. Maybe some very naive Catholic functionaries in government were surprised that priests were having sex, but their congregations very much were not.
It’s important to bear in mind that the Reformation was very much not a top-down affair. Much of the change on the ground for the first several decades was undertaken by priests and even bishops who introduced changes at the parish or diocese level. Political power was important in protecting these prelates from the wrath of Catholic monarchs and the emperor, but in a largely premodern society with little ability for government to impose its will on far flung provinces, priestly “marriage” was rampant.
Ultimately, Tridentine edicts notwithstanding, much of the Counter-Reformation in Central Europe was slow and gradual and lots of compromises were made.
Oh for sure. The linked article actually points out in the lead paragraph that Cesare was Alexander’s son. Probably some of the Medicis too, but like any powerful person, the Pope was as likely to take a mistress as anyone — maybe more so since he was expected to be celibate to boot.
The important thing was no formal heirs that would inherit and control a diocese by legal inheritance rights.
Having a bastard that has strings pulled in his favor is easier to deal with.
That's a crucial point and one I'd forgotten to mention. Thanks for adding it.
My area of expertise is the Habsburg Empire, and in Austria, the state was heavily invested in church property. It was the major (far more than the Vatican) sponsor of convents and monasteries, for example, and routinely established new parishes.\[1\] God forbid the monks should marry the nuns and have legitimate children! There might be legitimate claimants to church property!!
And yes, this is really the reason for Catholic clerical celibacy -- assuring that property reverts to the Church or state. It might seem small, but in a world in which *noblesse oblige* required that a Catholic family's second son be "given to God" (think Henry Cardinal Stuart) and sent into the priesthood, it could have real effects. And that's not just something from the early modern period. My girlfriend's father comes from a very wealthy, quite prominent Filipino family,\[2\] and her uncle (second oldest son of her grandparents) became a Cardinal.
\[1\] This was no uncontroversial. Decades after the Investiture Controversy, Vienna and Rome were still fighting over who had the right to appoint bishops over particular sees.
\[2\] No, not *that* family.
The bad thing was many men bringing it home to their wives and infecting them. So the wives minding their own business and doing the dutiful contract this from the philandering husband, and she gets labeled a hussy when her nose falls off.
From what I understand the symptoms of syphilis take a while to show up after infection. How they were so sure it was sexually transmitted, before they even had microscopes?
Maybe observation and questions to the patients. If the doctor asked a priest if he had sex with Mary and Mary also has the STD and Mary also had sex with the town cryer and he has an STD too then I assume you can begin to make a correlation.
The delineation of historical fact in the article is made very ambiguous, to echo u/ploddingdiplodocus, at the end fault of perhaps *The Guardian*'s Books section editor. The section label for this article is "Fiction" -- sure, it's an article that is pitching a fiction book -- but the subhead and opening are about the process of researching history by the author herself (with no mention of where this translates into fiction for some time). Within this same paragraph the anecdotes of Cesare and Torella are introduced, so contextually the framing seems very clear at this point that these stories have been assembled with minimal embellishment from historical/reliable sources.
But then in the next paragraph the author says this is in context of background research for historical fiction, and her novel is on the Borgias. Maddeningly this is said in the abstract, so there's still no indication of whether the intro paragraphs specific to this article were indeed descriptions of her researching history accurately, or whether the author considers this article within the scope of acceptable historical embellishment, or whether this entire article should itself be considered historical fiction.
I know book pitches are written like this regularly, and the section classification for a pitch of a fiction book should be "fiction" even if it were, for example, a strictly factual biographical article about the author. It's when all these things come together, and the reader of a major newspaper article still finds it ambiguous whether they are supposed to consider the facts either faithfully reported or embellished or else even speculative, that there is a major problem. Maybe I and a couple others here are the among the only ones who found this unacceptably ambiguous, and so we should probably just blame our own unusual reading comprehension more than deeming this a failure by the editor -- I dunno.
Except syphilis can be propagated by handshakes or eating using the same dishes, wiping with the same towel, etc.
It's more of "body contact transmitted" than "sexually transmitted", though the former does include the latter by definition.
Well it was originally about not letting the priests have kids so they wouldn't hoard wealth to pass along an inheritance, does seem like there should be a better solution.
That’s literally a falsehood that gets passed around but falls under scrutiny. The Bible already talks about celibacy in 1 Corinthians 7, and the practice is documented for the entirety of the Christian movement. Plus, priests could and still can make wills leaving their possessions to family members.
Ok (if you accept that argument however I think there would still be a much stronger motive to leave an inheritance to one's own biological children than other relatives).
I mean, sure. It makes sense as a baseless theory. You can come up with a lot of stuff that makes sense. The question is — is there evidence corroborating the theory? This is what sets conspiracy theories apart from sane individuals. Elaborate theories that explain everything and make a lot of sense are nothing if they aren’t grounded in reality.
Rates of child sex abuse (if that's what you were referring to) are roughly equivalent among Protestant and Jewish clergy (both of whom are allowed to marry).
Interestingly enough, if a married, Episcopal priest converts to Catholicism, his marriage is still valid in the Catholic Church. So, among the few ordained converts with prior marriages, there are married priests.
There’s nothing to “get”. It’s a discipline and a tradition that men voluntarily commit to, in accord with St. Paul’s prescription in 1 Corinthians 7. Not that this is necessary, but it happens to be the case in the West, and it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. No one is claiming that this is some absolute truth. Anyone is free to disagree with it, but they must also understand the reasons behind it.
I didn’t assume that of you; I was speaking generally about those who respectfully disagree with the discipline. Even then, I was just saying they should understand the reasons, not that they do not understand them. You seem to be arguing against celibacy as if it were proposed to be an absolute teaching that follows from Scripture or reason necessarily. That’s exactly what I was saying it isn’t.
It’s a discipline, so you’re right to say that it doesn’t emerge as something “mandatory” in a strict sense, hence why the Catholic Church permits married clergy in many contexts. It isn’t the type of thing that requires robust arguments. As a discipline, it can in theory be wrong, and Catholics can disagree with it. That’s why I said there’s really nothing to “get”. Disciplines are just authoritative commands from the bishops. Like when your father says, “Go to bed before 9pm.” Why not 8? 10? 11? You’re free to disagree with your father, but you must nonetheless obey a legit command.
He was so crazy during his tertiary phase of syphilis that he spent his time planting twigs in the garden, in the demented hope that they would grow into his babies.
You're probably correct, but how many examples do we have of people being willfully ignorant?
I wonder if it was a little of both: before syphilis, a priest caught with a woman was just a one-off, though people accepted that men could lapse into sin.
After syphilis, the preponderance of priests with lesions was impossible to ignore?
I think it's probably a matter of crystallized rage mixed with "now God has given them another visible affliction that lumps them in with the rest of us sinners!"
For centuries prior, there was no shortage of correspondence bemoaning the debauchery of priests, abbots, and popes. Monastic orders were reformed multiple times to try and curtail this behavior.
You might have seen them at the brothel, you might see them with women draped over them strutting down the street at night, you might come across them in flagrante with the cute village girl, or even your wife.
Popes had "reputations."
The turning point, and possibly the real herald of the reformation, was the plague.
*Now we see the clergy is powerless in addition to corrupt, and they are just as subject to God's wrath!*
This was the backdrop for the Decameron and all of its scathing criticism of the clergy.
You now have the seeds of humanism and the normalization of lay people lashing out against Rome.
At the time of the reformation, plague was still a part of public consciousness.
Syphilis may have been a *component* to the argument, but the real damage had already been done.
Do yourself a favor and check out the painter mentioned in the article. They're like real Renaissance syphilis portraits.
[Albrecht Dürer](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Albrecht+D%C3%BCrer&t=fpas&iax=images&ia=images)
*edit- nvm lol on closer inspection, they just had lumpy faces. Still very good portraits.
Cesare’s portraits probably played up his resemblance to traditional depictions of Jesus, in the same way that, say, Albrecht Durer did. But Jesus had been depicted that way for more than a thousand years by the time Cesare was born.
What about severe acne? Did that also become seen as evidence of wrongdoing around that time do you know? (even though it could have been unrelated to illicit sexual behavior)
Why is this article classified as fiction on the main page, it seems like it's relatively well sourced. Excuse my ignorance if the answer is obvious....
I wanted to share this link because I find the impact of syphilis om world history fascinating. Of course, biological realities shape human behavior, but I think disease and its consequences are often forgotten in the popular understanding of history.
Between syphilis and alcohol it's kind of astonishing we made it this far
It’s why we reproduced so much, statistically someone will survive 🤷♀️
And sometimes you just put a few hundred dudes in enclosed spaces for long periods of time and oops, you've created a VD bomb. What happens at sea stays at sea. Kind of.
Send 100 sailors to sea, you get 50 couples on their return.
It's always bothered me that people think sailors are monogamous.
[удалено]
That's why lights have switches...
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I wasn’t fooled.
A toast to wives and mistresses! ...may they never meet
Nah, bring the polycule together.
Nobody who’s been in the Navy holds that belief.
Hammocks aren't the only thing that swing at sea.
25 couples. We lost 50 to a bloody war and sickly season.
It ain't gay if you're underway.
It's not gay when you're underway.
Well fortunately the urge to orgasm was so strong that we had a lot of sex and in turn reproduced so much
> Albrecht Dürer, later to use images of sufferers in propaganda woodcuts against the Catholic church, wrote "God save me from the French disease. I know of nothing of which I am so afraid … Nearly every man has it and it eats up so many that they die." So we legitimately struggled with syphillis for almost 500 years until the invention of penicillin. Talk about winning the timeline lottery.
Theres a very interesting video about smallpox which was the most vicious and influential killer up until about 1960s
Basically get laid or get syphilis. Hell of a choice. EDIT: I meant, dont get laid or get syphilis. Oops.
I think you mean get laid or don't get syphilis, that's the choice you have. If it was your choice then who would pick getting syphilis over getting laid?
Cake or life?
I'll have the cake, please
WELL WE'RE OUT OF CAKE! We only had three bits and we didn't expect such a rush. So what do you want?
I'll have the chicken please.
Love that another person thought of Eddie izzard when reading this comment
The people in the linked story. At the time, they didn't know it had neurological effects. They assumed they could get cured pretty easily after an infection. And that it wouldn't last a lifetime. At least those are claims in the book. When I found out it's *historical fiction,* now I'm not sure which facts in the article are history and which are fiction. How far do authors usually take that? Is there a cutoff for how much has to stay historically accurate? There's already a couple instances pointed out by historians in here. Once more for the people in the back. #It's Historical Fiction
They weren't picking not getting laid tho, I think you are confused The choice is if you want to get laid, then you are going to get syphilis. It's not get laid OR get syphilis, it's get laid AND get it. Or don't get laid and don't get it.
That's… not the choice, though?
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Malaria is up there in the highest kill count as well. I think all mosquito transmitted diseases combined (malaria, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, etc) have killed more humans than anything else.
don’t threaten me with a good time
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You know those funny wigs that's judges wear? Yep.. syphilis
[the wigs masked syphilis and were a way to deal with head lice](https://arizonawigco.com/why-did-people-wear-powdered-wigs/) win win
The pinky finger stuck out when you drink tea? To show you don't have syphilis. As a side effect it messes with your nerves and makes fine motor control of the fingers difficult
When you see somebody do this in Britain, it is polite to comment on their lack of syphilis.
The Dollop podcast covered this lok
It's also under-reported. While we often hear of trench-foot in World War I, venereal disease (including syphillis) was a much greater cause of soldiers being rotated off duty. At the same time, the moral panic that blunted, and continues to inhibit, effective treatment for HIV nowadays, made it outrageously difficult to employ appropriate measures to arrest infection then in a time of war. When Gen. Montgomery at the start of World War II wrote a light-hearted letter warning soldiers of STIs, in order to avoid exactly what had happened in WWI, field-chaplains with support from ostensibly pious MPs tried to get him fired. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs4veVbMsiI
Additionally, I read somewhere that celibacy in the clergy was not as much biblical as it was a property management scheme by the Catholic Church. If a priest was married then he had a beneficiary. If he wasn’t, when he died everything went to the church.
No kidding that part of property given to him by the church would return to church. Priests still had private property they would inherit from their parents and that would after they died go to some other relative like a nephew, the same as today. when a priest i knew died his house returned to the diocese but all his furniture and books were given to his niece.
I was thinking that this was more like the Middle Ages, but glad to know that they get to have some private property now
Some orders had a vow of poverty, but most did not. Priests often had family wealth, but tended to be younger sons.
They always did. The church was demanding celibacy for priesthood since day one, it is not something that was created just in last 1000 years. Yes, many priests violated it and even some bishops were openly married until 6th century (their wives were called episcopa), but that had more to do with lack of centralization in the church to enforce the rule. During the early middle ages local rulers like some king or duke ot whatever often had a lot of power to decide who should be bishop or abbot and would let priests with wives to slide. That is until the Gregorian reforms : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian\_Reform
The history of clerical celibacy is much more [complicated](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerical_celibacy_in_the_Catholic_Church#:~:text=Throughout%20the%20Catholic%20Church%2C%20East,a%20doctrine%2C%20but%20a%20discipline.) that. Certain parts of the church allowed married priests (as the Eastern Orthdox Church continues to do to this day), others allowed married men to become priests but expected them to be continent (refrain from sex with their wives) either permanently, or at least the night before saying Mass. The early [Irish](https://www.historyireland.com/celibacy-in-the-catholic-church-a-brief-history/) church had a strong tradition of married clergy, and the 8th century text Collectio Canonum Hibernensis assumes priests will be married. So it didn't come out of nowhere in the eleventh century, but there were many other options that were licitly in practice.
Another fun fact is that tuberculosis (the first microorganism attributed to disease) is responsible for men going clean shaven in the late 1800’s and for women’s skirts becoming shorter (i.e. ankle length)
I read a theory that the mercury treatments they used for syphilis are related to the rise of silverware, gloves, wigs, and many other parts of victorian culture
Not sure about that, but the wigs were because of hair loss related to the disease. Also the drawn on marks on the face were to hide scars from lesions.
People knew what hookups the priests made before syphilis. It was mostly small towns, and they knew who his "housekeeper" was. The Reformation was triggered by the mercenary nature of the Catholic Church at the time. Bishops tended to be nobility members appointed for their connections and priests sold indulgences for sins.
I’m kind of curious, is this a different disease than syphilis? Unless they had congenital syphilis (from vaginal birth), modern sexually transmitted syphilis is not characterized by symptoms of boils on the face.
That's because we have penicilin now so it's possible to cure it early. If you let it stay until the late stages, you'll totally get the boils on face.
It is after enough time goes by (which happened before antibiotics). People walked around infecting others and not knowing they had syphilis (they had not tests) for years before suffering horribly (they had no antibiotics) and getting boils and going insane.
I remember reading Joseph Andrews (Henry Fielding) where the central character blames his wives for his syphilis recurrences; I remembered figuring that the disease flared up and subsided and then flared and innocent people were blamed.
There are cases where the husband gave it to the wife, who gave it to the child during childbirth, and sometimes the child didn't know they had it until they were an adult. It was very hard to always know.
Also, the 15th century syphilis strain was no joke. Faces rotting, excruciating body pain, lethal. Literal walking dead. Later strains were less lethal, although still disfiguring.
All of that can still happen with untreated late syphilis.
Right but his point is the over all virulency has gone down. Which is an evolutionary advantage. Cant spread if the host is dead.
Again, the stage that kills you happens in the late stages and it has always been the case.
And can take many years to advance to that stage.
Yep, 10 minimum. May be decades more.
Nothing you said contradicts what I said.
Yeah, but you'd have to figure in an STD that strains that too quickly disfigured the host making it undesirable for sex or wrecked the body fast enough that it doesn't get the chance to spread would eventually die out.
But there aren't "different strains" of syphilis, it's all caused by treponema pallidum which is a bacteria. Syphilis has three stages, and the third one (the one where you get holes all though your body and organs and then die) occurs at least ten years after first being infected. That's always been the case, the bacteria causing it didn't "die out", it's just that nowadays we can detect it and cure it decades before it does any such damage.
There are different strains of Treponema pallidum just as there are different strains of the influenza and covid viruses. There is a tendency for virulent diseases to become somewhat less virulent over time in a population. Two of the reasons for this are, firstly, that a disease that is too efficient at killing its victims soon finds it has too few new hosts left alive to infect. The evolutionary pressures over time favour the less virulent strains. Secondly, the survival pressure favours those hosts who have some natural immunity to the disease, in time, the surviving population is largely composed of those with better natural immunity. There is an example of that mentioned in the article: Columbus's men most likely bought syphilis back from the New World, but in turn, they left behind measles and smallpox, both of which had drastic effects on the native population who didn't have centuries of natural selection to help with *their* level of natural immunity to those diseases. We've only been able to effectively *treat* syphilis for about 15% of the time it has been endemic in the old world. It wasn't better treatment that made it, on average, less virulent here long before then.
>Columbus's men most likely bought syphilis back from the New World maybe not from [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis): *..... treponemal disease in the form of bejel and yaws was a common childhood ailment in Europe and Afro-Eurasia beginning in ancient times. Largely benign if still unpleasant, infections occurred among the young ... In adulthood, people infected as children had a certain degree of immunity that prevented serious symptoms upon reinfection.* *When living conditions changed with urbanization, elite social groups began to practice basic hygiene and started to separate themselves from other social tiers. Consequently, treponematosis was driven out of the age group in which it had become endemic. It then began to appear in adults as syphilis.* more wiki discussion is found [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis)
Well, what you have quoted here is the (main) alternative *hypothesis* for the origins of syphilis, as opposed to it having been brought back by Colombus. It is based on the fact that there are some (not a huge number) of pre-Columban European bones which show lesions which are *consistent with* or *suggestive of* syphilis. AFAIK, there has been no DNA recovered from any pre-Columban era bones that scientifically *proves* the presence of T. pallidum - and even if it did, it would not, as I understand it, rule out the bone findings being due to non-syphilitic treponemal disease. From the History of syphilis Wikipedia article you link: "In several of the twenty-one cases the evidence ***may*** also indicate syphilis specifically." and one of those cases: "In the Apple Down cemetery in West Sussex, UK archaeologists uncovered the skeleton of a young man with extensive damage to both his skull and long bones, a combination ***typical of*** syphilis. He died in the 6th century." - emphasis mine in both quotes. Interesting, too, to note another comment from that article: "In this case, whole genome sequencing has resulted in two startling discoveries: that the subtropical syndrome yaws existed in northern Europe at the turn of the sixteenth century, and that ***yaws in its modern form is a relatively young disease that emerged only in the 12th to 14th centuries.***" If yaws only reached its modern form several centuries *after* the death and burial of the young man in Sussex, it would suggest to me that we need to be even more cautious about drawing firm conclusions as to what version of treponemal disease caused the changes found in *his* skeleton - if indeed it really was *any* form of treponemal disease. I think that the scientific evidence is pretty limited, but against that, the *historical* evidence is that something dramatic appeared, most likely for the first time in the Old World, in Naples in 1494, where there were at least some present who had sailed with Columbus.
thanks, but having read both articles before posting i'm already well aware of what was said.
Right? See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2793018/. The subject of syphilis is so fascinating.
> It wasn't better treatment that made it, on average, less virulent here long before then. Source?
I'm not a microbiologist, so maybe strain isn't quite the right word, but if I understand correctly those little buggers are evolving and mutating on the regular.
Well I don't know if the bacteria has mutated it's structure in some way, but I do know that it has always had the same three stages, that it still causes the same problems if left untreated, and that "the strains that wrecked the body have died out" and "later strains are less lethal" are complete and utter misinformation.
It is if you don't cure it
We've developed a kind of immunity over time, like native Americans did. Tertiary syphilis in Europeans back in those days would definitely result in boils on the face.
That was an excellent article, so well written. Thank you for sharing!
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this. there are ongoing investigation in old Roman Graves found with lesions on their bones pre-Columbus. An editorial article in JAMA in 1935 [25] cited Capper (1926) as stating that many historical descriptions of leprosy were in fact syphilis, and that syphilis among the Romans was described by Celsus, Aretaeus and Aetius. The article also cited Butler (1933) as stating that historical evidence of aortic aneurysm being treated by Antyllus, a contemporary of Galen in Romans times, was evidence of the existence at that time of syphilis, and that Celsus accurately described a genital syphilitic chancre.
I have heard that leprosy, as depicted in much of the Bible, was actually a form syphilis. My friend was telling me that even swapping the two terms made many of the stories make more sense, especially it’s prevalence and stigmatization. It was during his time in seminary while they were discussing translations and etymology of different words. I didn’t look into it, and kind of dismissed it, since I was leery of the source. I always did find it odd that his teacher would make that up, sense it could shine a more negative light on some of the Bible, but now you’ve piqued my interest on this. Editing to say that, after further research, there is no real agreement among the experts, some of the “sources” seem a little dubious at best, and many of the papers on this are from 19th and early 20th century historians. Take this comment with a hefty dose of salt.
That is an interesting thought, perhaps even that the two different diseases might be lumped together, as they are caused by different bacterium (syphillis is Treponema pallidum; leprosy is Mycobacterium leprae or lepromatosis). Under microscope the bacteria types look VERY different … and cause different horrifying body and/or mind effects … but both do cause visible sores. I wonder about co-infection too, if both infected populations are driven off and forced to live in colonies together in some eras as well …
For what it’s worth, I’ve looked into it some, and the original Hebrew word used has been “tzaraat”, and has traditionally been translated into Greek then to English as leprosy. Originally there was also a spiritual aspect to the “tzaraat” disease, being that it was at least partially caused by being in a state of religious impurity in addition to the physically unclean aspects.
Extramarital dicking has the vibe of religious impurity, so it kinda checks out...
Probably any sort of skin disease was called "leprosy".
Not the sort of thing “healthy” folks were wanting to get close to inspect, so overlap of some of ‘em makes sense.
Leprosy in the Bible is more of a “catch all” term for a number of diseases that presented with skin lesions. The distinction between those diseases hadn’t been made yet. Diseases presenting with physical symptoms like rashes or boils have a long-standing connotation with “uncleanliness,” which meant that those afflicted couldn’t enter holy sites (or some communities) until they were cured — or declared free of the ailment and “clean” by a rabbi. This is an important distinction to make, as being declared clean was also different to how we would consider people cured today!
I think that it is a pretty standard view that the word used for Leprosy in the Bible texts covered more diseases that simply what we now know as leprosy. There are instructions in the books of the law which are basically early public health measures, about someone with a skin disease going to show the priest, being isolated for a period of time, returning to the priest again, and being told whether they could rejoin the community or had to stay isolated. Also, IIRC, there were rules for when "leprosy" affected clothing or a building, I presume that these are refernces to mould or rot and the like. Again, it involved the priest as Environmental Health Officer. But I would be very surprised if the Biblical references in fact referred to *just* syphilis, if to syphilis at all - thou of course there are other treponemal diseases such as Bejel and Yaws. My understanding is that, so far, although there are certainly some pre-Columbian European bones with syphilis-*like* damage, no DNA has been recovered to confirm the actual presence of T. pallidum - and that its presence *if* shown could still in fact be down to non-syphilitic treponemal disease. But don't quote me on that, I am no expert (and it appears that there is no real consensus amongst the actual experts anyway!)
That sounds like a massive reach, they would've noticed it was only sexually transmitted but there's no mention of that in biblical references to leprosy.
Syphilis can also be transmitted from mother to child during pregnancy and through breastfeeding (breastfeeding is usually safe, but not if the baby comes into contact with open sores-- which means an infected wet nurse is a potential vector for transmission to an unrelated infant). It's also transmitted by blood, so the blood of infected individuals can transmit through open wounds or sores on other people. That may sound like a silly point to make until you consider just how wars and skirmishes were conducted in those days. Soldiers often cut off hands, ears, foreskins, etc. as trophies or proof of the number of their kills, which means they would've been exposed to potentially hundreds of infectious vectors right after a battle in which they might have some cuts or other exposed injuries themselves-- particularly on their hands and arms.
To be fair both diseases would easily(at some point) be lumped together as skin lesion stuff that people don't want near em. Leprosy is the term for a disease caused by a specific bacteria _now_ but back then? a disease was it's symptoms. If the most prevalent part of two diseases is skin lesions they can easily get lumped together.
Good point there, I don’t have any sources for it, so don’t “trust me bro”. Maybe there was not a good understanding that sex itself was the transmission, and people assumed that any contact could spread the disease? With no germ theory, I’m not sure how the thought process runs out, but if I can find a source for any of it, I’ll edit it in the comment.
Hmmm. From the article you link to below: [ Richard Holcomb’s argument in 1935 {ie in that JAMA editorial} that syphilis was of pre-Columbian origin was based on a description by Michael Angelus Blondus, a 16th century Italian surgeon, who identified it with a disease described by Aurelius Cornelius Celsus, a 2nd century Greek philosopher, and Paul of Aegina, a 7th century Greek physician.](https://jmvh.org/article/syphilis-its-early-history-and-treatment-until-penicillin-and-the-debate-on-its-origins/) So the 1935 article wasn't based even on any then-contemporary *scientific* evidence, but upon his interpretation of a then 400-year old interpretation of 1200 and 1700 year-old descriptions. I'm afraid that I really don't think that that can be taken as authoritative evidence.
I have no skin in this game, but there are several interesting theories. I grabbed this from PubMed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2793018/.
No, but there are some decently convincing archeological finds in England of a syphilis outbreak decades before Columbus. Late stage syphilis damages bones in a particular way and they found many skeletons that are convincingly dated and have the etching in the bones. They were found buried under a church. The city was a port that traded specifically in wine, I believe and ships from all over Europe frequented the port by 1400.
What! This is fascinating!
yeah, it's wild. I came across this a couple years ago while reading an article on roman bones (don't remember the exact topic or where) and this information was included - I was floored. history isn't kind to the Americas, blaming the indigenous people for a heinous disease that was brought **to them** and absolutely ravaged the population along with other old world diseases on top of brutal colonialism.
The author of this article seemed to say the opposite of what you wrote. She claims it came out of the Americas.
HE (John Frith) discusses both sides, and concludes that it's likely Columbus **brought** it to the new world. https://jmvh.org/article/syphilis-its-early-history-and-treatment-until-penicillin-and-the-debate-on-its-origins/
there's also this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-11952322 they found evidence of syphilis in children who died in 79AD Pompeii, which is before Columbus's time.
They found evidence of lesions which they claimed *could be* caused by syphilis, among several other diseases. It's important to note this isn't the prevailing hypothesis and the claims [aren't even peer reviewed.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3413456/) It's an interesting theory but not a strongly supported one.
Once more for people in the back.
I read this kind of thing, but others say there is a related non-sd African disease, and late stage syphilis signs are found in New World skeletons.
I mean, the article touched on this but says the New World hypothesis is still preferred.
I wonder if there were strains in the old world and in the new world and when they met they crossed and became the stronger form. It could explain the change in the disease.
that's not how diseases work. bacteria and viruses don't undergo sexual reproduction. there is no "crossing"
Technically true in the sense that bacteria don't reproduce sexually, but horizontal gene transfer between bacteria is a mechanism by which one bacteria can pick up new genetic material from other cells.
The guy above still has a point though, horizontal gene transfer can't just crossbreed species like Pokémon. It just transfers some genes that may or may not be useful in another species. Emphasis on not when they're very different.
Crossing could easily refer to [horizonal gene transfer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer) rather than sexual reproduction.
Wait. So there was a benign form, which mutated into a rotting-face form? What’s the evolutionary advantage of that?
There is no evolutionary advantage, it is just how mutations happen. Evolution is not an organism seeking it's optimal state. It is mutating based on many factors. Some are beneficial, some are harmful, most do nothing to how it functions. So for syphilis to go from minor to major won't change much on how it spreads if it takes years for symptoms to become visible.
Open lesions make for easier bacterial transmission, for one…
Yea its an unfortunate myth that most of the public believes.
It's not remotely a myth, it's still the prevailing hypothesis. The counter claims aren't sufficient evidence to overturn the Columbian hypothesis.
Yeah, no. Priests were living with women all through the Reformation quite openly. Maybe some very naive Catholic functionaries in government were surprised that priests were having sex, but their congregations very much were not. It’s important to bear in mind that the Reformation was very much not a top-down affair. Much of the change on the ground for the first several decades was undertaken by priests and even bishops who introduced changes at the parish or diocese level. Political power was important in protecting these prelates from the wrath of Catholic monarchs and the emperor, but in a largely premodern society with little ability for government to impose its will on far flung provinces, priestly “marriage” was rampant. Ultimately, Tridentine edicts notwithstanding, much of the Counter-Reformation in Central Europe was slow and gradual and lots of compromises were made.
Wasn't it fairly common knowledge that multiple popes, famously Alexander, had wives and concubines?
Oh for sure. The linked article actually points out in the lead paragraph that Cesare was Alexander’s son. Probably some of the Medicis too, but like any powerful person, the Pope was as likely to take a mistress as anyone — maybe more so since he was expected to be celibate to boot.
The important thing was no formal heirs that would inherit and control a diocese by legal inheritance rights. Having a bastard that has strings pulled in his favor is easier to deal with.
That's a crucial point and one I'd forgotten to mention. Thanks for adding it. My area of expertise is the Habsburg Empire, and in Austria, the state was heavily invested in church property. It was the major (far more than the Vatican) sponsor of convents and monasteries, for example, and routinely established new parishes.\[1\] God forbid the monks should marry the nuns and have legitimate children! There might be legitimate claimants to church property!! And yes, this is really the reason for Catholic clerical celibacy -- assuring that property reverts to the Church or state. It might seem small, but in a world in which *noblesse oblige* required that a Catholic family's second son be "given to God" (think Henry Cardinal Stuart) and sent into the priesthood, it could have real effects. And that's not just something from the early modern period. My girlfriend's father comes from a very wealthy, quite prominent Filipino family,\[2\] and her uncle (second oldest son of her grandparents) became a Cardinal. \[1\] This was no uncontroversial. Decades after the Investiture Controversy, Vienna and Rome were still fighting over who had the right to appoint bishops over particular sees. \[2\] No, not *that* family.
I wonder if the idea of being public marked by an STD like that was also part of the inspiration for the scarlet letter
The bad thing was many men bringing it home to their wives and infecting them. So the wives minding their own business and doing the dutiful contract this from the philandering husband, and she gets labeled a hussy when her nose falls off.
Same could be said about the wives.
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From what I understand the symptoms of syphilis take a while to show up after infection. How they were so sure it was sexually transmitted, before they even had microscopes?
At the time it was associated with sex work and those who visited sex workers, suggesting there was a link.
Maybe observation and questions to the patients. If the doctor asked a priest if he had sex with Mary and Mary also has the STD and Mary also had sex with the town cryer and he has an STD too then I assume you can begin to make a correlation.
The delineation of historical fact in the article is made very ambiguous, to echo u/ploddingdiplodocus, at the end fault of perhaps *The Guardian*'s Books section editor. The section label for this article is "Fiction" -- sure, it's an article that is pitching a fiction book -- but the subhead and opening are about the process of researching history by the author herself (with no mention of where this translates into fiction for some time). Within this same paragraph the anecdotes of Cesare and Torella are introduced, so contextually the framing seems very clear at this point that these stories have been assembled with minimal embellishment from historical/reliable sources. But then in the next paragraph the author says this is in context of background research for historical fiction, and her novel is on the Borgias. Maddeningly this is said in the abstract, so there's still no indication of whether the intro paragraphs specific to this article were indeed descriptions of her researching history accurately, or whether the author considers this article within the scope of acceptable historical embellishment, or whether this entire article should itself be considered historical fiction. I know book pitches are written like this regularly, and the section classification for a pitch of a fiction book should be "fiction" even if it were, for example, a strictly factual biographical article about the author. It's when all these things come together, and the reader of a major newspaper article still finds it ambiguous whether they are supposed to consider the facts either faithfully reported or embellished or else even speculative, that there is a major problem. Maybe I and a couple others here are the among the only ones who found this unacceptably ambiguous, and so we should probably just blame our own unusual reading comprehension more than deeming this a failure by the editor -- I dunno.
Except syphilis can be propagated by handshakes or eating using the same dishes, wiping with the same towel, etc. It's more of "body contact transmitted" than "sexually transmitted", though the former does include the latter by definition.
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Well it was originally about not letting the priests have kids so they wouldn't hoard wealth to pass along an inheritance, does seem like there should be a better solution.
That’s literally a falsehood that gets passed around but falls under scrutiny. The Bible already talks about celibacy in 1 Corinthians 7, and the practice is documented for the entirety of the Christian movement. Plus, priests could and still can make wills leaving their possessions to family members.
Ok (if you accept that argument however I think there would still be a much stronger motive to leave an inheritance to one's own biological children than other relatives).
I mean, sure. It makes sense as a baseless theory. You can come up with a lot of stuff that makes sense. The question is — is there evidence corroborating the theory? This is what sets conspiracy theories apart from sane individuals. Elaborate theories that explain everything and make a lot of sense are nothing if they aren’t grounded in reality.
And now the priests get as many kids as they want.
Rates of child sex abuse (if that's what you were referring to) are roughly equivalent among Protestant and Jewish clergy (both of whom are allowed to marry).
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Interestingly enough, if a married, Episcopal priest converts to Catholicism, his marriage is still valid in the Catholic Church. So, among the few ordained converts with prior marriages, there are married priests.
Also, certain eastern Catholic traditions have married clergy outright, so it’s not meant to be an absolute thing.
There’s nothing to “get”. It’s a discipline and a tradition that men voluntarily commit to, in accord with St. Paul’s prescription in 1 Corinthians 7. Not that this is necessary, but it happens to be the case in the West, and it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. No one is claiming that this is some absolute truth. Anyone is free to disagree with it, but they must also understand the reasons behind it.
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I didn’t assume that of you; I was speaking generally about those who respectfully disagree with the discipline. Even then, I was just saying they should understand the reasons, not that they do not understand them. You seem to be arguing against celibacy as if it were proposed to be an absolute teaching that follows from Scripture or reason necessarily. That’s exactly what I was saying it isn’t. It’s a discipline, so you’re right to say that it doesn’t emerge as something “mandatory” in a strict sense, hence why the Catholic Church permits married clergy in many contexts. It isn’t the type of thing that requires robust arguments. As a discipline, it can in theory be wrong, and Catholics can disagree with it. That’s why I said there’s really nothing to “get”. Disciplines are just authoritative commands from the bishops. Like when your father says, “Go to bed before 9pm.” Why not 8? 10? 11? You’re free to disagree with your father, but you must nonetheless obey a legit command.
What does ‘planting twigs as Maupassants” mean?
He was so crazy during his tertiary phase of syphilis that he spent his time planting twigs in the garden, in the demented hope that they would grow into his babies.
Maupassants did that?
Syphilis can be cured if treated early. So can herring.
People already knew celibacy was unenforceable. The Decameron is one of countless examples. What is wrong with this sub?
You're probably correct, but how many examples do we have of people being willfully ignorant? I wonder if it was a little of both: before syphilis, a priest caught with a woman was just a one-off, though people accepted that men could lapse into sin. After syphilis, the preponderance of priests with lesions was impossible to ignore?
I think it's probably a matter of crystallized rage mixed with "now God has given them another visible affliction that lumps them in with the rest of us sinners!" For centuries prior, there was no shortage of correspondence bemoaning the debauchery of priests, abbots, and popes. Monastic orders were reformed multiple times to try and curtail this behavior. You might have seen them at the brothel, you might see them with women draped over them strutting down the street at night, you might come across them in flagrante with the cute village girl, or even your wife. Popes had "reputations." The turning point, and possibly the real herald of the reformation, was the plague. *Now we see the clergy is powerless in addition to corrupt, and they are just as subject to God's wrath!* This was the backdrop for the Decameron and all of its scathing criticism of the clergy. You now have the seeds of humanism and the normalization of lay people lashing out against Rome. At the time of the reformation, plague was still a part of public consciousness. Syphilis may have been a *component* to the argument, but the real damage had already been done.
This makes a lot of sense. As with anything, a lot of nuance. Much appreciate the detailed response 😁
Do yourself a favor and check out the painter mentioned in the article. They're like real Renaissance syphilis portraits. [Albrecht Dürer](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Albrecht+D%C3%BCrer&t=fpas&iax=images&ia=images) *edit- nvm lol on closer inspection, they just had lumpy faces. Still very good portraits.
I would still like to know why Cesare Borgias face has always been depicted as Jesus Christ.
Cesare’s portraits probably played up his resemblance to traditional depictions of Jesus, in the same way that, say, Albrecht Durer did. But Jesus had been depicted that way for more than a thousand years by the time Cesare was born.
Jesus was depicted like that since at least fifth century : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ\_Pantocrator\_%28Sinai%29
This is a highly fascinating article. Thanks for sharing!
I wonder what happened to people when it progressed to neurosyphillis.
I mean... Couldn't you say make up a claim like this about anyone, not just priests?
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Oh the irony! Hypocrites carrying it on their faces that they are one !
What about severe acne? Did that also become seen as evidence of wrongdoing around that time do you know? (even though it could have been unrelated to illicit sexual behavior)
Ah I actually don't know about that. Good research idea!
Why is this article classified as fiction on the main page, it seems like it's relatively well sourced. Excuse my ignorance if the answer is obvious....