is, in the opinion of many, is
nevertheless still spreading, even in the chief centres of civilization;
this has been noted alike in Paris and in London.[223]

According to the belief which is now tending to prevail, syphilis was
brought to Europe at the end of the fifteenth century by the first
discoverers of America. In Seville, the chief European port for America,
it was known as the Indian disease, but when Charles VIII and his army
first brought it to Italy in 1495, although this connection with the
French was only accidental, it was called the Gallic disease, "a monstrous
disease," said Cataneus, "never seen in previous centuries and altogether
unknown in the world."

The synonyms of syphilis were at first almost innumerable. It was in his
Latin poem _Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus_, written before 1521 and
published at Verona in 1530, that Fracastorus finally gave the disease its
now universally accepted name, inventing a romantic myth to account for
its origin.

Although the weight of authoritative opinion now seems to incline
towards the belief that syphilis was brought to Europe from
America, on the discovery of the New World, it is only within
quite recent years that that belief has gained ground, and it
scarcely even yet seems certain that what the Spaniards brought
back from America was really a disease absolutely new to the Old
World, and not a more virulent form of an old disease of which
the manifestations had become benign. Buret, for instance (_Le
Syphilis Aujourd'hui et chez les Anciens_, 1890), who some years
ago reached "the deep conviction that syphilis dates from the
creation of man," and believed, from a minute study of classic
authors, that syphilis existed in Rome under the Caesars, was of
opinion that it has broken out at different places and at
different times, in epidemic bursts exhibiting different
combinations of its manifold symptoms, so that it passed
unnoticed at ordinary times, and at the times of its more intense
manifestation was looked upon as a hitherto unknown disease. It
was thus regarded in classic times, he considers, as coming from
Egypt, though he looked upon its real home as Asia. Leopold Glueck
has likewise quoted (_Archiv fuer Dermatologie und Syphilis_,
January, 1899) passages from the medical epigrams of a sixteenth
century physician, Gabriel Ayala, declaring that syphilis is not