Syphilis had many names, and almost all of them pointed to someone else.
Between the 15th and 17th centuries, the French called it “Neapolitan disease”; the Russians, “Polish disease”; and the Spanish, “French disease” or “Gallic disease”. The Dutch, Portuguese, and Italians called it “Spanish disease”, “Spanish disease”, or “Spanish scabies”; for the Haitians, it was “British disease”, and for the Turks, “Christian disease”.
In 1530, the Italian physician Girolamo Fracastorius used the name syphilis in a didactic poem. There, the shepherd Syphilus was punished for leading an immoral life full of vices. The name endured; the nicknames, by contrast, passed the disease from one country to another.
