A Night with Venus
The French disease, the holy wood, and the mercury cure.
In the Texts
The pox came to Europe in 1495 and the Materia Medica carries its remedies: guaiacum, the holy wood from the Indies, with its sweating cure; sarsaparilla; and quicksilver, as ointment, pill, and fumigation, which the Paracelsians defended and the Galenists feared. The demonologists read the disease as a scourge and its victims as sinners, which the physicians, who treated it, did less.
What Medicine Makes of It
The Columbian origin is the best-supported account (Harper, 2011). Mercury has some action on the spirochaete at doses that poison the patient: the salivation, lost teeth, tremor, and madness of the treated were mercury, and the proverb knew it. Guaiacum seemed to work because secondary syphilis remits for years; von Hutten praised it in 1519 and died of the disease in 1523. Salvarsan (1910) was the first cure, penicillin (1943) the second, and Tuskegee (1932–72) the scandal that gave medicine its consent rules.
The Evidence
- Harper et al. (2011) reviewed the skeletal and documentary evidence for the origin of syphilis and found the Columbian hypothesis best supported: a treponemal disease carried to Europe in 1493 and erupting in Naples in 1495 as the mal francese.
- Mercury, as ointment, fumigation, and the pill, was the treatment from 1497 (Widman) to 1910; the salivation, loosened teeth, tremor, and madness that Paracelsus and Fracastoro described in the treated were mercury poisoning, and “a night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury” was the proverb. The drug has some action on the spirochaete at doses that poison the patient.
- Guaiacum, the holy wood, seemed to cure because secondary syphilis remits on its own for years before the tertiary stage; the Fuggers held the monopoly, and von Hutten’s treatise of 1519 praising it was written by a man who died of the disease four years later.
- Ehrlich’s arsphenamine (Salvarsan, 1910) was the first drug designed against a microbe and the first that cured; Mahoney’s penicillin trial (1943) replaced it within the decade. The Tuskegee study (1932–72) withheld treatment from 399 Black men to watch the natural course, and gave the modern consent rules their founding scandal.
- Fournier (1879) and Krafft-Ebing (1897) established that general paralysis of the insane, which filled a tenth of the asylums, was late syphilis; the Wassermann test (1906) and Noguchi’s finding of the spirochaete in the brain (1913) closed the case.
Where They Part
Four centuries of treatment with a poison for a disease that remits on its own is the case the historians of medicine cite against the whole pharmacopoeia; the reading is that the holy wood was harmless and the quicksilver was not, and that neither was the cure.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Harper, K. N., et al. (2011). “The origin and antiquity of syphilis revisited: an appraisal of Old World pre-Columbian evidence for treponemal infection.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 146 (Suppl. 53).
- Quétel, C. (1990). History of Syphilis. Johns Hopkins.
- O’Shea, J. G. (1990). “‘Two minutes with Venus, two years with mercury’: mercury as an antisyphilitic chemotherapeutic agent.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 83.
- Jones, J. H. (1981). Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Free Press.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.