Disgraceful Archaeology (14 page)

For a long time it was believed that syphilis was brought to Europe by Christopher Columbus — the rape of the New World brought pox to the Old. In recent years, however, a number of cases have been found which show this is not true. Columbus and his crew may have brought back a particularly virulent strain of the disease, but it was already in Europe long before — perhaps often mistaken for leprosy (
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One of the earliest cases recorded is from a medieval Essex girl — the skeleton of a woman aged between 25 and 50 was unearthed in a churchyard in Rivenhall, near Witham. She lived sometime between 1290 and 1445, and seems to have contracted the venereal form of syphilis up to ten years before her death.

But Essex was not alone. Hull too has yielded evidence of pre-Columbus syphilis in four skeletons unearthed from a mid-fifteenth-century Augustinian friary. They had fully developed tertiary syphilis, which shows that the Great Pox — or ‘the French disease’ as it became known — was already well established in Europe at least half a century before Columbus set sail.

The disease brought out xenophobia everywhere: in Holland it was known as the Spanish disease, in Russia the Polish disease, in Siberia the Russian disease, in Turkey the Christian disease, and in India and Japan the Portuguese disease! Desperate measures were taken from the start in an effort to combat it — dieting, haircutting, blood-letting, steam baths, and especially the application of mercury (
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).

For example, the skull of Isabella d’Aragona (1470–1524), an Italian noblewoman who was a possible inspiration for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, has teeth coated with a black layer. She had tried so hard to remove it that the enamel on her incisors was rubbed away. Analysis of the black layer showed that it was caused by mercury intoxication — inhalation of mercury fumes was common at that time as a treatment for syphilis. It eventually caused inflammation of the teeth and, in fact, Isabella’s death was probably caused by the mercury treatment rather than the syphilis!

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First published 1999

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