I’ve been reading in another thread about the depopulation of the Americas by European diseases. This got me to wonder about European deaths from diseases imported from the Americas. Specifically Syphilis - I’m not aware of any others. I’m having trouble finding historic mortality counts. Does anyone have that information?
I would be curious also as to when this was first recognised as an STD.
Wikipedia has a good overview of the subject and what is known about it today. A lot of trivia I was unaware of – such as that it was at one point treated by infecting the patient with malaria.
Apparently initially the disease was quickly fatal, but after about 50 years of its presence in Europe, it became the slowly disfiguring and dementing disease of today.
Definitely by the end of the sixteenth century, if not earlier. Elizabethan plays are absolutely loaded with uneasy jokes about “the French pox,” and it’s clear that they knew exactly how people got it.