Venereal diseases in sixteenth-century England.

THRmE SEEMS to have been a certain amount of despondency on the early history of syphilis in England. Several authorities have remarked what little record there is of venereal disease in the sixteenth century in England compared with continental Europe. Astrucl names only four British medical authors on venereal disease before 1600 compared with two hundred other European sources, and even then one is anonymous (1570), and another a Scotsman, Peter Lowe (1596), albeit his work was published in London. This leaves William Clowes and George Baker2 whose work will be discussed later. However, later in his work Astruc quotes the eighteenthcentury London surgeon William Beckett, who included several other sixteenthcentury English sources in his review (1718-1720)' of the early history of venereal disease in England, trying to prove the antiquity of syphilis. Of course at that time the separate pathologies of syphilis and gonorrhoea had not been formulated, these being considered part of the same disease. Even as late as 1891 Creighton4 in his History of Epidemics in Britain states that syphilis makes hardly 'any appearance in the English records of the time and no appearance at all in the writings of the English profession.' However not only have medical writers given us some record of the early history of syphilis, but a cornucopia of writings on venereal disease can be found in the daily records, court books (Emmison),5 and belletristic works of those times. Before I begin my survey I should make it clear that I regard the evidence for the American origin of syphilis and the first appearance in Europe with the return of Columbus and his sailors in 1493 as overwhelming. Whether syphilis came to the British Isles directly from Spain, or followed the disbandment of mercenaries after the siege of Naples in 1495, spreading along with the followers of Perkin Warbeck from France to Scotland, is a matter for conjecture; nevertheless by the end of the fifteenth century it had made its appearance in Britain. The oldest witness of the new disease is the Spanish physician Ruy Diaz de Islas who, as a young man was practising in Barcelona in 1493 when he saw the first epidemic manifestation of lues. 'In Castille they called it "Bubas" but I call it the serpentine malady of the Isle of Hispaniola; and the reason I call it serpentine, "Morbo Serpentino", is because one cannot find a more horrible comparison, for as this animal is hideous, dangerous and terrible so the malady is hideous, dangerous and terrible.' The early history of syphilis in Scotland has been covered by Comrie7 (1932), and Morton8 (1962). This survey covers its early history in England. The late Professor Shrewsbury has recently (1970) mentioned two of the earliest notes of its existence in the British Isles. In 1493-1494 the town of Shrewsbury was affected: 'and about thys tyme began the fowle scabbe and horryble sychness called the freanche pocks."0 In 1494, a Chronicle of Lynn (Ireland) records,"1 'In this yer begane the ffrenche pockes.' Lynn was a seaport, but Shrewsbury had no doubt been infected via Chester