Until it was named for a character in Ovid's Metamorphoses, what deadly disease had been called the 'French disease' in Italy and Germany, and the 'Italian disease' in France? Guess nobody wanted to associate themselves with it!
"historians place its emergence in the New World, arguing that the crews of Columbus’s ships first brought the disease to Europe. The first recorded case of syphilis occurred in Naples in 1495, after King Charles VIII of France besieged the city of Naples, Italy. The soldiers, and the prostitutes who followed their camps, came from all corners of Europe. When they went home, they took the disease with them and spread it across the continent. Smallpox is a highly contagious disease caused by the Variola virus. There are four variations of smallpox; variola major, variola minor, haemorrhagic, and malignant, with"
"Díaz de Isla estimated that over a million people were infected in Europe. He also postulated that the disease was previously unknown, and came from the island of Hispaniola (modern Dominican Republic and Haiti). The name ""syphilis"" was coined by the Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro in his pastoral noted poem, written in Latin, titled ""Syphilis sive morbus gallicus"" (Latin for ""Syphilis or The French Disease"") in 1530. The protagonist of the poem is a shepherd named Syphilus (perhaps a variant spelling of Sipylus, a character in Ovid's ""Metamorphoses""). Syphilus is presented as the first man to contract the"
"in developing the welfare state including public health. Tuberculosis was the most dreaded disease of the day, especially striking young people in their 20s. Germany set up vigorous measures of public hygiene and public sanatoria, but France let private physicians handle the problem, which left it with a much higher death rate. The French medical profession jealously guarded its prerogatives, and public health activists were not as well organized or as influential as in Germany, Britain or the United States. For example, there was a long battle over a public health law which began in the 1880s as a campaign"
"widespread disdain for the English Poor Law. Tuberculosis was the most dreaded disease of the day, especially striking young people in their 20s. Germany set up vigorous measures of public hygiene and public sanatoria, but France let private physicians handle the problem. The French medical profession guarded its prerogatives, and public health activists were not as well organized or as influential as in Germany, Britain or the United States. For example, there was a long battle over a public health law which began in the 1880s as a campaign to reorganize the nation's health services, to require the registration of"
"the welfare state including public health. Tuberculosis was the most dreaded disease of the day, especially striking young people in their 20s. Germany set up vigorous measures of public hygiene and public sanatoria, but France let private physicians handle the problem, which left it with a much higher death rate. The French medical profession jealously guarded its prerogatives, and public health activists were not as well organized or as influential as in Germany, Britain or the United States. For example, there was a long battle over a public health law which began in the 1880s as a campaign to reorganize"
"Europe, killing more than five million people. As Jared Diamond describes it, ""[W]hen syphilis was first definitely recorded in Europe in 1495, its pustules often covered the body from the head to the knees, caused flesh to fall from people's faces, and led to death within a few months,"" rendering it far more fatal than it is today. Diamond concludes,""[B]y 1546, the disease had evolved into the disease with the symptoms so well known to us today."" Gonorrhoeae is recorded at least up to 700 years ago and associated with a district in Paris formerly known as ""Le Clapiers"". This"
"several kinds raged among combatants and civilians in Germany and surrounding lands from 1618 to 1648. According to Joseph Patrick Byrne, ""By war's end, typhus may have killed more than 10 percent of the total German population, and disease in general accounted for 90 percent of Europe's casualties."" During Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812, more French soldiers died of typhus than were killed by the Russians. A major epidemic occurred in Ireland between 1816 and 1819, during the famine caused by a worldwide reduction in temperature known as the Year Without a Summer. An estimated 100,000 Irish perished. Typhus"
"all of the spoils from his campaign in Italy. Thus, the battle of Fornovo was a French pyrrhic victory. Charles VIII died in April 1498, before he could regroup his forces and return to Italy. During this war an outbreak of syphilis occurred among the French troops. This outbreak was the first widely documented outbreak of the disease in human history, and eventually led to the Columbian theory for the origin of syphilis. Italian War of 1494–1498 The First Italian War, sometimes referred to as the Italian War of 1494 or Charles VIII's Italian War, was the opening phase of"
"pieces burned, mixed with water, and administered to family members as a cure. In Saxon regions of Germany, a lemon was placed in the mouth of suspected vampires. Tales of supernatural beings consuming the blood or flesh of the living have been found in nearly every culture around the world for many centuries. The term ""vampire"" did not exist in ancient times. Blood drinking and similar activities were attributed to demons or spirits who would eat flesh and drink blood; even the devil was considered synonymous with the vampire. Almost every nation has associated blood drinking with some kind of"
"frequently changing his residence. The disease suddenly appeared in Hamburg, spreading so rapidly that, in a few weeks, more than a thousand people died. The sickness swept through eastern Europe as an epidemic causing high mortality rates. It arrived in Switzerland in December, then was carried northwards to Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and eastwards to Lithuania, Poland and Russia. Cases of the disease were not known to occur in what is now France (except in the Pale of Calais, which was controlled by England at the time) or Italy. It also emerged in Flanders and the Netherlands, probably transmitted directly"
"supported the pneumonic hypothesis. There are no exact figures for the death toll; the rate varied widely by locality. In urban centres, the greater the population before the outbreak, the longer the duration of the period of abnormal mortality. It killed some people in Eurasia. According to medieval historian Philip Daileader in 2007: The trend of recent research is pointing to a figure more like 45–50% of the European population dying during a four-year period. There is a fair amount of geographic variation. In Mediterranean Europe, areas such as Italy, the south of France and Spain, where plague ran for"
"name because the one identified by Kitasato, a type of streptococcus, cannot be found in the lymphatic glands. However it is Paul-Louis Simond who was the first to understand and describe the etiology of the plague and its modality of contamination: he observes all over the bodies of the people affected by it small flea-bites, which he also found on the bodies of the dead rats that were always linked to the plague, and then deduced that the fleas which carried the bacteria were its true vector or source, and that they transmitted the illness by jumping from the dead"
"flu epidemics; those most at risk were the sick and elderly, while younger, healthier people recovered easily. But by August, when the second wave began in France, Sierra Leone, and the United States, the virus had mutated to a much deadlier form. As the PBS ""American Experience"": Influenza 1918 episode says, October 1918 was the deadliest month of the whole pandemic. This increased severity has been attributed to the circumstances of the First World War. In civilian life, natural selection favors a mild strain. Those who get very ill stay home, and those mildly ill continue with their lives, preferentially"
"lice, trench fever, cooties (body lice) and the ‘Spanish Flu’. To maintain morale, wartime censors minimised early reports of widespread influenza illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII). This created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit, thereby giving rise to the pandemic's nickname, ""Spanish Flu"". Protracted action at Verdun throughout 1916, combined with the bloodletting at the Somme, brought the exhausted French army to the brink of collapse. Futile attempts using"
"Europe and wiped out a full third of the population in short space of 1348–1350. It has been described as ""a pandemic of plagues such as the world had not seen since the sixth century and was not destined to see again till the 1890s."" It was actually three related diseases: bubonic plague and septicaemic plague, carried by fleas hosted by the black rat, and pneumonic plague, the especially fast and lethal airborne variant. The few areas that escaped included Poland, Hungary, Rouergue in France, Liège in Belgium, and the county of Béarn in the Pyrenees. It has been suggested"
"He dubbed it Bacillus influenzae (or Pfeiffer's bacillus), which was later called Haemophilus influenzae. Few doubted the validity of this discovery, in large part because bacteria had been shown to cause other human diseases, including anthrax, cholera, and plague. When history's deadliest influenza pandemic began in 1918, most scientists believed that Pfeiffer's bacillus caused influenza. With the lethality of this outbreak (which killed an estimated 20 to 100 million worldwide) came urgency—researchers around the world began to search for Pfeiffer's bacillus in patients, hoping to develop antisera and vaccines that would protect against infection. In many patients, but not all,"
"geographic origin. It was implicated in the outbreak of encephalitis lethargica in the 1920s. To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII). This created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit, thereby giving rise to the pandemic's nickname, ""Spanish Flu"". The major troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France, was identified as being at the center of the Spanish flu by research published"
"Crimean peninsula. When the ship left port in Kaffa, many of the inhabitants of the town were dying, and the crew was in a hurry to leave. By the time the fleet reached Messina, all the crew were either dead or dying; the rats that took passage with the ship slipped unnoticed to shore and carried the disease with them and their fleas. Within Europe, the plague struck port cities first, then followed people along both sea and land trade routes. It raged through Italy into France and the British Isles. It was carried over the Alps into Switzerland, and"
"infectious diseases, to mandate quarantines, and to improve the deficient health and housing legislation of 1850. However, the reformers met opposition from bureaucrats, politicians, and physicians. Because it was so threatening to so many interests, the proposal was debated and postponed for 20 years before becoming law in 1902. Implementation finally came when the government realized that contagious diseases had a national security impact in weakening military recruits, and keeping the population growth rate well below Germany's. Another theory is the low rate of French population growth, relative to Germany, was due to a lower French birth rate perhaps due"
"that these areas were spared due to the predominance of O-Blood type, which had only recently taken root in the heartlands of Europe, although this hypothesis has yet to be proven. The pandemic, which began in central Asia, was first reported in Europe in the summer of 1346. The Genoese colony of Caffa in the Crimea was besieged by the Tartars, who catapulted plague-ridden corpses into the city. The defenders carried the disease back to Italy; in October 1347 it reached Messina in Sicily, in December a ship carried the virus in Marseille, and by January 1348 it was in"
"in Europe. Many of the crew members who served on this voyage later joined the army of King Charles VIII in his invasion of Italy in 1495, which some argue may have resulted in the spreading of the disease across Europe and as many as five million deaths. Some findings suggest Europeans could have carried the nonvenereal tropical bacteria home, where the organisms may have mutated into a more deadly form in the different conditions and low immunity of the population of Europe. Syphilis was a major killer in Europe during the Renaissance. In his ""Serpentine Malady"" (Seville, 1539) Ruy"
"Spanish flu also spread through Ireland, carried there by returning Irish soldiers. The Allies of World War I came to call it the Spanish flu, primarily because the pandemic received greater press attention after it moved from France to Spain in November 1918. Spain was not involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship. The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 pandemic is not known, but an estimated 10% to 20% of those who were infected died. With about a third of the world population infected, this case-fatality ratio means 3% to 6% of the entire global population"
"was a disease of the ""Latin races"", to which Anglo-Saxon men were virtually immune. In Germany, too, a majority of the medical profession rejected Charcot's ideas, and medical journals circulated papers that labeled French men as more prone to hysteria than Teutons — ""which, in the context of the time, meant that they were weaker, less virile, and more susceptible to degeneration"". An 1889 case study of hysteria in a German soldier gave the French doctors the ammunition they needed for a counterattack. Aside from French and Germans, indigenous inhabitants of various remote regions, colonial populations, Jews and (retroactively) pre-Civil"
"results of which were also published in ""The Gentleman's Magazine"". As in England, the disease was seen as analogous with smallpox. While these experiments were reasonably successful, they did not have a significant impact: The total number of inoculations in England appears to have been very limited, and after 1780, the English interest in inoculation disappeared almost entirely. Almost all further experimentation was done in the Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark. Due to a very severe outbreak at the end of the 1760s, some of the best-known names in Dutch medicine became involved in the struggle against the disease. Several"
"the 16th century smallpox had become well established across most of Europe. With its introduction into populated areas in India, China and Europe, smallpox affected mainly children, with periodic epidemics that killed as many as 30 percent of those infected. The settled existence of smallpox in Europe was of particular historical importance, since successive waves of exploration and colonization by Europeans tended to spread the disease to other parts of the world. By the 16th century it had become an important cause of morbidity and mortality throughout much of the world. There are no credible descriptions of smallpox-like disease in"
"have been carried from the Americas to Europe by the returning crewmen from Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas; or it may have existed in Europe previously, but went unrecognized until shortly after Columbus returned. These are the ""Columbian"" and ""pre-Columbian"" hypotheses, respectively, with the ""Columbian"" hypothesis best supported by available evidence. The first written records of an outbreak of syphilis in Europe occurred in 1494 or 1495 in Naples, Italy, during a French invasion (Italian War of 1494–98). Since it was claimed to have been spread by French troops, it was initially called the ""French disease"" by the people"
"the total deaths. In Sub-Saharan Africa, over 75% of cases were due to ""P. falciparum"", whereas in most other malarial countries, other, less virulent plasmodial species predominate. Falciparum malaria was familiar to the ancient Greeks, who gave the general name ""pyretós"" ""fever"". Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BCE) gave several descriptions on tertian fever and quartan fever. It was prevalent throughout the ancient Egyptian and Roman civilizations. It was the Romans who named the disease ""malaria""—""mala"" for bad, and ""aria"" for air, as they believed that the disease was spread by contaminated air, or miasma. A German physician, Johann Friedrich Meckel, must"
"fever, autumn fever, Akiyama disease, and marsh or swamp fever. ""L icterohaemorrhagiae"" was identified as the causative agent in pre-World War II outbreaks in Japan, which were characterized by jaundice and a high mortality rate. In October 2010 British rower Andy Holmes died after contracting Weil's Disease. His death has raised awareness of the disease among the public and medical professionals. Leptospirosis has many different names including: ""7-day fever"", ""harvest fever"", ""field fever"", ""canefield fever"", ""mild fever"", ""rat catcher's yellows"", ""Fort Bragg fever"", and ""pretibial fever"". It has historically been known as ""black jaundice"" and in Japan it is called"
"his status as a feared and ""evil"" being led to him being merged into the concept of Satan. In Belgium, this personification of Death is now commonly called ""Pietje de Dood"" ""Little Pete, the Death"". As with some of the Dutch names, it can also refer to the Devil. In Scandinavia, in Norse mythology death was personified in the shape of Hel, the goddess of death and ruler over the realm of the same name, where she received a portion of the dead. In the times of the Black Plague, Death would often be depicted as an old woman known"
"even during a battle and enemies must be allowed access to water. Despite some vague understanding of how diseases could spread, the existence of viruses and bacteria was unknown in medieval times, and the outbreak of disease could not be scientifically explained. Any sudden deterioration of health was often blamed on poisoning. Europe was hit by several waves of Black Death (often identified as bubonic plague) throughout the late Middle Ages. Crowded cities were especially hard hit by the disease, with death tolls as high as 50% of the population. In their distress, emotionally distraught survivors searched desperately for an"
"million people – up to a third of Europe's population – died from the plague before it receded. The plague periodically returned over coming centuries. The last centuries of the Middle Ages saw the waging of the Hundred Years' War between England and France. The war began in 1337 when the king of France laid claim to English-ruled Gascony in southern France, and the king of England claimed to be the rightful king of France. At first, the English conquered half of France and seemed likely to win the war, until the French were rallied by a peasant girl, who"
"remain in their possession for over two centuries. The term ""Black Death"" which refers to the first and most serious outbreak of the Second Pandemic was not used by contemporaries, who preferred such names as the ""Great Pestilence"" or the ""Great Mortality"". It was not until the 17th century that the term under which we know the outbreak today became common, probably derived from Scandinavian languages. It is generally agreed today that the disease in question was plague, caused by ""Yersinia pestis"" bacteria. These bacteria are carried by fleas, which can be transferred to humans through contact with rats. Flea"
"are often incomplete and may be exaggerated. The chronicles do show that epidemic disease was not a condition exclusive to war time, but was present in many parts of Germany for several decades prior to 1618. When the Imperial and Danish armies clashed in Saxony and Thuringia during 1625 and 1626, disease and infection in local communities increased. Local chronicles repeatedly referred to ""head disease"", ""Hungarian disease"", and a ""spotted"" disease identified as typhus. After the Mantuan War, between France and the Habsburgs in Italy, the northern half of the Italian peninsula was in the throes of a bubonic plague"