Just wondering about a contradiction I see in two of Cecil’s columns.
In “The amazing history of chewing gum” (link) it says: The chewing gum habit goes back to the Indians, actually. Such a deal: they give us gum, tobacco, and Manhattan island; we give them firewater, syphilis, and Frank Sinatra. Oh, well.
But in “Why did so many Native Americans die of European diseases but not vice versa?” (link) it says: However edenic the New World may have been, it may have harbored one bug that did kill a lot of Europeans: syphilis.
So I’m wondering which is the real Straight Dope? Who found syphilis first?
It was thought for a long time that syphilis came from the New World, but very recent investigations of medieval skeletal remains have found evidence of syphilis in pre-Columbian Europe. The current theory is that it existed on both sides, but in two different strains, and that the Old-World strain wasn’t as severe (or wasn’t as severe to Europeans).
I’m not sure about Cecil’s first quote. I didn’t think that syphilis was ever thought to have been transmitted from the Old World to the New. It may have been meant to be “smallpox”.
So, in other words, in the chewing gum column Cecil wrote ‘smallpox’ (correctly) and Little Ed changed it for whatever reason to read ‘syphilis’ which is of course not correct?
While syphilis may have been present in part of the New World, it wasn’t present everywhere. Europeans spread it around and lots of Native Americans contracted it from them.
Europeans may have contributed to the spread of syphilis in the New World (though they didn’t need to; the evidence is fairly clear that smallpox, once introduced, quickly ravaged the American interior without further white assistance), but it is also a fact that Europe didn’t even know there was any such disease until after Columbus, even though soon afterwards it was as notorious as it is today. It is only very recently that old skeletons have revealed that it existed in pre-Columbian Europe at all.
At present, historical epidemiologists regard syphilis as one of their biggest puzzles. Every bit of evidence seems to be contradicted by another.
This would seem to interlace with the long-running debate about pre-Columbian expeditions to the Americas, eh? If the Irish, the Vikings, the Africans, etc. made incursions to the New World before Columbus, then the returning explorers could have brought syphilis back to Europe. We may never know.
How far pre-Columbian? If it was, say, AD 800, then we can rule out the Vikings, too. And I think that Brendan was in the 700s, so earlier than that would exonerate him as well (of course, being monks, he and his crew were probably less likely to spread syphilis).
Alright, so what actually happened was that in the chewing gum column Cecil included a paragraph on the conflicting evidence regarding syphilis in the New World and how it was hard to come to a definite conclusion either way, but Ed edited it out without telling him, due to space considerations or something?
I presume John is refering to the excavation of 4 bodies identified as sufferers in a monastic graveyard in Hull. According to this feature (scroll to the bottom) from British Archaeology on the site in general, the dates are 1450 - 75. The local council hosts this page about the excavations, but only lightly touches on the syphilis angle.
There’s also a recentish isolated case from Essex, dated to between 1296 and 1445.
However, similar claims have been made before and disputed.
The question that I, as an interested onlooker, never see discussed in the debate is how good or otherwise is the archaeological evidence for syphilis in the Americas prior to 1493 ?
Yes, it was the Hull excavations I was thinking of.
The problem is that, if syphilis is a purely Old-World disease, how is it that Europe doesn’t seem to have noticed it before Columbus, even though it had achieved epidemic status by 1500? And there is clear pre-Columbian evidence in the New World, and, specifically, in the Dominican Republic, where Columbus visited.
Offhand, I can see two possibilities. 1) An Old-World strain that was less severe than the New-World strain (at least to Europeans), and 2) A mutation (probably, I understand, from the yaws pathogen) that just happened to arise in the 1490’s. Possibility 1 seems to demand less from coincidence.
People forget that celibacy is fairly new in the Catholic (and other Christian) churches. For most of it’s history, priests were not required to be celibate. That requirement was started around 1200, and took several decades to come into force in all countries. (I’ve heard that a major reason for this requirement was problems with inheritance by heirs of priests, and arguments about whether some property was the personal property of the priest or the communal property of the parish. Such public arguments were considered unseemly. Reminds me of recent arguments about gifts to US Presidents: were these personal gifts to them, or gifts to the country they represented.)
Monks may or may not have been required to be celibate; it depends on the individual monastary & the order they followed. But in general, most monastaries were celibate for years before the requirement of priestly celibacy was enacted. So at this time (700’s AD), it’s probably likely that Brendan’s monks were under a rule of celibacy.
We have no evidence that Brendan and his monks ever made it to the New World. For all we know, they just went to Iceland, where there were some Irish monks when the Norse made it there.
