From the Vault: Syphilis

We've discussed. It published August and it's a pair of episodes that Julie Douglas and I put together that discussed the history of syphilis, how the science of syphilis, how syphilis works. Yes, the the sexually transmitted disease syphilis, and it is just a fascinating topic. It's it's easily one of my my favorite episodes of all time. Uh So, we we've taken those two episodes and stitched them together

into one episode. So it might be a little clunky at times, but all the information is is definitely still valid. Will there be vampires, There will be vampires. Be prepared for the syphilitic vampire. All right, Well, let's go right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. From How Stuff Works, Dot com hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind.

My name is Robert Lamb and um Julie Douglas, and I'd like you to take a moment to just try and create, try and imagine the most destructive disease possible. Imagine the disease that ravages the body. That ravage is just about every tissue, every every part of the human form that it takes down, the sex organs, that takes apart the face, takes apart your identity, and in some cases ultimately robs you of your mind as well before

killing you outright. Yeah, you mentioned sex organs. So also imagine that there's a moral to mention to this disease that would give you the sort of outward appearance that perhaps you had been engaging in conduct unbecoming to you. Yes, And of course, in all of this, we're talking about a very real illness, and that is syphilis. We're actually

going to devote two whole episodes to syphilis here. This first episode, Syphilis the Great Imitator, is mainly going to focus on the organism that causes syphilis and how syphilis

manifests itself in the human body. In the second episode, we are going to get into the cultural and historical impact of syphilis, because that that in its own right is an enormous topic of interest because for four and a half centuries, syphilis ravages the Old World, ravages Western culture, and it's it's really kind of difficult to overstate the the role that syphilis played in coloring Western civilization during

that time. Yes, don't run away, because this is alf really interesting that the bacteriaum itself is fascinating, and then of course the cultural implications. Now we have our first recorded epidemic of venereal syphilus occurring in Europe, and by the close of the fifteenth century you have chaos just reraining in Naples, Italy, where there's a huge outbreak. In fact, uh, Pope Innocent the eighth asked French King Charles the Eighth to invade the city with troops to try to keep

it under control. But what do you think happens? Well, as we would, as we would eventually learned, sending troops and to deal with syphilis not the best strategy because because that they're going to end up catching the syphilis, and then when you draw the troops out, they're going to take the syphilis elsewhere exactly. And the problem here is that syphis as being known as the great imitator because it has all these different symptoms that at the

outset might be mistaken for other illnesses. So imagine this time period in which this was happening and people not quite knowing what they were dealing with. Yeah, to quote Sir William Ostler, he says, no syphilis in all its manifestations and relations and all other things clinical will be added to you. There is no organ in the body, nor any tissue in the organs, which syphilis does not invade.

And it is therefore manifestly difficult to speak, at least at all concisely of the pathology of the disease, just as as it is almost impossible to describe its clinical symptoms without mentioning almost every symptom of every known disease. And these symptoms are not going to be the same from one person to the next. So you have a disease that is that is seemingly very stealthy, very nefarious. It's uh, it's it's changing its shape, it's changing its strategy,

it's going dormant, it's popping back up and uh. And the whole time everyone's trying to understand what's going on, how to prevent it. Uh. Again, there's there's this this whole seemingly moral side to it because it's spread through sexual contact, and it ends up spreading across every social level in society. Uh. It's it's a disease that ravages the poor, it ravages the rich. It's hitting the royalty, it's hitting the clergy, it's hitting anyone who's engaging in

sexual contact, which everyone. Right. In fact, it is so prevalent that you get a couple of references to it in Shakespeare's works like Pox of your Houses and Romeo and Juliet, which is now a curse like a pox on you. It's but the problem with this is that we tend to think of it as this antiquated illness, right,

it is not. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control estimate that annually more than fifty five people in the US get new syphilis infections, and during two thousand and twelve there were more than forty nine thousand reported new cases of syphilis compared to forty eight thousand estimated new diagnosis of HIV. So it is still present and it is most common in people between the ages of twenty and twenty nine years of age, which has led it

to be called cupids disease by the way. Yeah, and of course, one other way we should mention that you can transfer syphilis is through an unborn child, and so congenital syphilis, which we'll we'll talk about a little bit more later. That's also a huge problem because when the syphilis manifests in a newborn child, uh, the the the

effects are kin it can be pretty disastrous. So once against syphilis, even though it is a tremendous interest from a historical standpoint, it is not a purely historical disease. Now we just don't put as much emphasis on it these days in terms of infectious diseases because it can be controlled by penicillin, and we'll talk about that later. Yes, yes, it can be wiped out by penicillin and uh and and that has been a huge advantage in the war

against syphilis for sure. But still it is it is an adversary that that carries on even in the advent of what would seem a magic bullet. Yeah, and let's talk about this dastardly organism also known as treponema palladum. Yes, such Treponema palladum, which is a treponemal disease. There are other treponemal diseases which will get into these and cool include a visual penta and yaws. None of these, of course are sexually transmitted, but they are essentially skin ailments

that are that are transferred by skin to skin contact. Yes, so they are related to Treponema palladum, but they themselves, as you say, are not spread through sexual contact. And I should add to to be clear if you want to get really particular. Syphilis is caused by a subspecies of Treponema palladum, essentially Treponema paladum palatum. But for all intents and references going forward, Treponema palladum ke paalatum syphilis.

You'll know what we're talking about. Yeah, Now, this is a spiral shaped bacterium also known as a sparrow keet and we're talking about slender, spirally undulating bacteria here and again it is most often spread by sexual contact, and

the disease occurs in three primary stages. We'll talk more about that and uh, now, these these later stages that will discuss are not so common in our modern era, right, Yeah, because the later stages obviously deal with a case of syphilis that has not been treated, not been cured with the penicillin. All right, let's let's talk about how syphalis is transmitted. And I'd like you to think about this, uh in terms of an invasion, because that's what it is.

We're dealing with an invasion of these spiral keets into the human body. And this invasion takes place in a few different phases. So syphilis can be spread again by through the through the birthless, sent by kissing, close contact, um, transfusion of fresh human blood. But the main ways that it's that it's spreading us through sexual contact. We're talking vaginal sex, oral sex, anal sex um. All of these

will serve as as a as an entry point. Now, the way that the spiro keets into the body they enter through the skin, and when intimate contact of this nature is made, that is when when the spiro keet enters the body, enters through the skin and there it will hang out until it makes itself known in the form of a syphilitics or also known as a shanker and shankers occur mainly on external genitals that jina anus or in the rectum. They can also occur on the

lips and in the mouth. So this is when you see most of the transmission occur among people when these sores are present. Right, this is primary syphilis. This is first stage syphilis. And think of this in terms of the enemy initially getting into the fortress. This is the shanker is literally the entry point for the for the spiro keets. And it may be a small number of spire keets and maybe a larger number of spiro keets, but this is where they're getting in. This is the

whole in the fortress wall. Yeah. And these shankers can appear usually around twenty one days after infection, but sometimes as little as ten or even ninety days. Yeah, and they may hang around for three to six weeks. And here's the thing. They can if you look up pictures online and sure you should definitely go into a Google image search for for what these look like. Your loins, your your loins, But they may look pretty intense at times,

but these are painless. Uh, And they're easily confused with any number of small skin ailments that may pop up in even a healthy person's life, you know, the stuff like ingrown hairs or or you know, or various other bumps. So that would be caused by by any number of other ailments. Again, it's a great imitator. Right now. If you do not get treated at this point, well then it gets into secondary syphilis. And during this stage that's when you see those skin rashes, swords in your mouth.

And so that's the primary stage and the and it's key to note here that the shanker disappears advantishes. So if you were concerned about it, if you really I wonder what this painless, you know, ugly spot on my genitals is, well, then it goes away. And that's one of the dangers that we see over and over again with syphilis is that the the infection seems to go away, the illness may seem to go away, but as we're about to learn, it does not. And again, imagine yourself

in you know, the fifteenth century. If you have this and then that disappears, you think, oh, everything is fine, right, So I got was upset over and over nothing, and you know, maybe you didn't even notice. It's it's entirely likely that one wouldn't even notice that the shanker had popped up. Now, most likely you wouldn't have been treated at that point in time because there wasn't anything necessarily

to treat you with that was really effective. So it would then develop into a secondary stage called secondary syphilis, in which you would have skin rashes and or sores in your mouth, vagina, and anus also called mucus membrane lesions. Yeah, and you may also see other varying symptoms such as fever, lethargy, headaches,

general body aches, hair loss. And this is the point of the invasion in which the enemy, the enemy made it in in the primary stage and in second dary syphilis, the enemy has spread throughout the castle, all right, and and is making itself known throughout the invaded city, that is the human body, right, and you are highly contagious at this point in fact, gentle mill source caused by syphilis make it a lot easier to transmit and acquire things like HIV infection, right, so you can get a

secondary infection at this point in fact, there is an estimated two to fivefold increased risk of acquiring HIV if you're exposed to infection when syphilis is present in these

first and second stages. Now at this point after secondary syphilis, and here again we see that the secondary syphilis, this outbreak period, this goes away as well, which again could lead someone to say, well, that was horrible, and maybe they may not even realize that it was connected to the primaries outbreak, and they might, but they can easily imagine, well, I'm done with this now, it's it's it's it's done. It's finished. Whatever illness was affecting me, the pox has

left me, right. Yeah, But little do they know that this is just the latent stage of the US and it's just waiting around. It might not even reveal itself for decades. Yeah. So imagine the enemy has invaded the castle, They've made a lot of mischief, and then suddenly they seem to be gone. But they're not gone. There in the basement. They're in the basement, They're in there in every house in the city. There. They've literally become a part of the city. They're essentially a sleeper cell. Uh.

And that is what latent syphilis is. Tertiary syphilis. The stage really is quite gruesome because it kind of takes everything in the body down to the studs, or more so, I should say, it's like you say, the sleeper cells in the basements, they become stronger and they come roaring back into the body and they cause a lot of havoc. Yeah, it's I mean, we see this over and over again

with with syphilis. But it has such metaphorical power. Is one of the reasons that I think we're aside from its uh, its power to harm and di figuous, uh, the reason we're drawn to it so is you do see this idea of of the the infection. It flared up, then it flared up again, and then it comes back in only fifteen of the case is a much stronger form in the tertiary stage, far more debilitating, far more

destructive and ultimately lethal stage of the illness. Yeah. In this late stage you could have symptoms that include difficulty coordinating your muscle movements, paralysis, not being able to move some of your body, uh, numbness, blindness, and dementia. And then in the late late stages, the disease begins to ravage your internal organs and that is what can result in death. And this is one of the remarkable things about this is that this stage can occur ten to

twenty years after primary syphilis. So this is it's again the metaphorical phorical power of this. It's like the the sins of the young individual coming back to destroy the older individual. You know. It's um, it's it's gruesome stuff, and and and against that one may not even remember that for style, break all that clearly and suddenly all these changes are happening to their body and ultimately to

their mind. Yeah. And we have largely up until this point treated this in a very clinical fashion and not really talked about the sights and the sounds and the spells of what this looks like, which we'll do more

in the next podcast. But just know that at this point, um, this this, this is really adding injury to insult because you might have lost your nose, you know, and recovered from that, and and all of a sudden you think you're out in the clear, and boom it comes back in in such a corrosive manner that you find out

that this is really the death knell. Yeah. Corrosive is an excellent term to use because you see the you see loss of teeth, you see the destruction of the palette in the mouth, you see you see the the the collapse of the nose into what is known as saddle nose, where basically the nose collapses and around the bridge and becomes kind of upturned and smaller looking, and then they eventually um appear to rot entirely. Uh. Saddle nose is also caused can also be caused by just

damage to the nose. You'll see boxers that suffer from saddle nose. Also. UH. Extreme cocaine addiction can somehow sometimes have that effect on individuals. But yeah, you're seeing it attack your facial features, You're seeing it attack uh, your genitals in a very destructive manner, and then also getting into your organs. You only again to back to the quote that I read at the beginning of the podcast

by h Dr William Osler. It it the spiral keets of syphilis attack every part of the body like nothing is off limits. To go back to that castle analogy from from earlier, the invader has lived in the city for ten to twenty years and now in potentially every household in the city has decided to just burn everything to the ground right now. The other part of this is that syphilis, as we have mentioned before, can be tru trans admitted through the placenta. So what does this mean.

It means that during that time period from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there are a lot of children born with syphilis also called congenital syphilis, and even to this day, according to the World Health Organization, you

have a million children born annually with congenital syphilis. Yeah, and it's very serious stuff because nearly half of all children infected with syphilis, whether or in the womb, die shortly before or after birth, and sometimes this can also result in still borns um And despite the fact that syphilis can be cure with antbiotics if caught early, there are arising rates among pregnant women in the United States, and that of course has increased the number of infants

born with this. Now, some of the complications include blindness, deafness, deformity of the face, and nervous system problems. Now, why does syphilis hang out in the body so long, you might be wondering, Well, Uh, it's it maybe due in part to keep a pallatum having a slow dividing time of thirty to thirty three hours, and it's likely that t pautum undergoes an even slower rate of division during the latent stages of the disease. So it's a it's

it's a long living creature. From a bacterial standpoint, yes, it's like a bacterial croc pot Yeah. Alright, Um, let's talk about the current state of treatment and infections. Oh, but I say current, I have to mention that there are a couple of old timey ways in which they were thought to be cures for it, one of which is mercury. Yes, inhaling mercury vapor. In fact, there is This was so common for hundreds of years that a little phrase came out of that, A night with venus

a lifetime with mercury. Yeah. So you would find yourself going regularly for essentially skin treatments, taking these these mercury steam bats and and enduring the harmful effects of that of that mercury anihilation on top of the ravages of syphilis. It did kill the sparrow key but yes, it also poisoned the patient. Yeah. Well, there are a few different factors involved there, because on one hand, uh, their you know, their arguments to what effect the mercury had in killing

the sparrow keets. But then the sparrow keets are so entrenched in the body, what can you do. Also, again, think about that that primary and secondary stage, the flare ups and the disappearance. You have individuals that could go into it to be treated for for their symptoms of syphilis, and low and behold, the symptoms vanish with the treatment, not because of the treatment, just because of the timing

of the treatment. And ultimately, again you're dealing with four and a half centuries in which there is no cure for this illness. So if someone's trying to sell you an illness, you're going to try and buy it. That's just how it goes. And you know, if this disease is ravaging my body, if you tell me that mercury

might help, then I'm probably going to try mercury. Sure, you're going to try anything at that point, including malaria, which was apparently something that was discovered in n by Julius Wagner Jarig to help halt some of the symptoms of syphilis, particularly in neurosyphilis, that advanced stage in which you get psychosis and you get paralysis. And they found that if you induced a malarial fever in patients, well that could help with the actual infection. You also saw

the use of so called ciphilization treatments. This was where you would essentially try to inoculate the patient in the same way that you would treat them for smallpox. Um, this didn't work. Uh, it's submitting yourself to the disease, right right, Yeah, trying to to build up you know, bodily immunity doesn't work. Now, I've I've read some mixed reports of how experiments on rabbits uh in the modern

age have potentially shown some possibility there. But you get into a situation where it would take so many applications of syphilis and and we're talking about a rabbit and it hasn't been studied enough and you would certainly could not study it in humans. So so yeah, and then also why study it when we have penicillin that can wipe it out? And sometimes it's diagnosed by testing fluid from a syphilis sore and looking for the sparrow keet via dark field microscopy. The name of that blood test,

by the way, is the Wasserman blood test. Uh. And it was developed in nineteen o six just to get everything in the timeline squared away there so as we had mentioned syphilis can be treated with antibotics, so we're talking about penicillin. We're talking about g venzatine, doxycycline, or tetracycline, and that's for patients who are usually allergic to penicillin. In the length of treatment depends on the extent of the infection and factors such as the person's overall health.

So let's say you didn't get to it right away and you kind of get to the second or or have a secondary phase of it, you would still have to deal with any sort of ill effects that you might have sustained at that point. All right, So at this point you might be wondering, what can I do two decrease my chances of catching syphilis. Well, according to the CDC, there basically two things you can do because there's no there's no vaccine for syphilis. We have a

cure for syphilis. But then again you get into the problem of detecting it, knowing to report it, et cetera. UM. And then even once you've treated syphilis, there's no undoing any damage that it's done. UM. So number one, be a part of a long term, mutually monogamous relationship with a partner who has been tested and has negative STD test results. And number two, use latex condoms the right way every time you have sex. Condoms prevent transmission of

syphilis by preventing contact with a sore. Sometimes sores occurring areas not covered by a condom. However, in contact with these sores can still transmit syphilis. Because again it's about it's it's it's it goes through the skin. It's not something that travels through the orifice. Now this might surprise you, but the people who really need to hear this most besides year olds, are senior citizens. Yes, and this surprised me.

This was some some some interesting material that you discovered. Yeah, we actually a while ago we had someone from the CDC come and talk to us about STDs. Not because our group needed a talking to but because of the cyphilis outbreak at work right now, but because every once in a while, as someone will come and and sort of give us information and and um, it's always very interesting. And he had mentioned then that retirement communities, assisted living facilities,

these are all hotbeds for STDs. And this is in part because they are not practicing safe sex. And also you have to keep in mind that that for a long time, perhaps many of of the community members were in long term relationships, but now they probably have lost a partner. And it's a very social community. Uh, there's a lot of sex going on with senior citizens in these communities. And numbers from the Centers for Disease Control

and Prevention show a rapid increase among older people. Were talking about between two thousand and seven and two thousand and eleven, clamydium infections among Americans six five and over increased by thirty one and syphilis by fifty two percent. See, I just had I had no idea. I end up struggling to try and piece together, like a timeline for a hypothetical uh assisted living resident, how they acquire the syphilis and then how and then how they end up

passing it on to multiple people in the facility. They just need to get the old posters, you know, in the nineteen forties and put them back up. And we'll talk more about that in the next episode. But there were definite campaigns, uh, you know, trying to get some sort of awareness going with Americans about STDs. Indeed, yes, we'll get into all of that in our next episode titled Syphilis through the Ages. Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert lamp and Julie Douglas.

This is part two of our little series here on syphilis. The first episode, Syphilis the Great Imitator, dealt with the the organism that causes syphilis stuff which is known as Treponema palladum. Actually it's a subspecies of Trepinema palladum. And this is all caused by this tiny, tightly coiled spiral key, this little bacterium that ends up causing all of this trouble for those that infected. So if you have not listened to that first episode, go back, have a listen.

We will walk you through all the stages of a syphilis infection from that that from the tiny annoyances of the primary infection on up to the disastrously deforming and ultimately lethal stages of tertiary syphilis, as well as the treatment of it. Finally, um alright, this has been mentioned

in the other episode, but it bears mentioning again. The first recorded epidemic of narial syphilis occurred in Europe in by the close of the fifteenth century, it was pretty rampant in fact, in Naples, Italy, there was such a huge outbreak that the pope that said, hey, we need some help here. Soldiers were brought in, five thousand of them. And what do you think happened, Well, they got to the prostitutes and they got more syphilis, and then of

course they just got worse and worse. So what we're talking about is is a disease that ravished for centuries throughout Europe, and today we're going to try to get at the origins of it, and they're gonna try to tease out some of the morality that has been paired with it, as well as the sort of xenophobia that

surrounds it as well. Yeahs, As I mentioned before, it's it's it's kind of difficult to overstate the importance of syphilis in Western culture for the four and a half plus centuries um that it that that it was a problem. Um And and as we discussed in the last episode, syphilis is not eradicated. It is still around the day. It's still something to be concerned about, and it's still something we have to to treat both with with with

penicillin and with education. But during the fourteenth century to the early twentieth century, it was really permeating the fabric of culture. It was rampant. Yes, when we break down the percentages of it, it's going to vary depending on where in Europe you're looking, but you're generally looking at

a ten to fifteen percent of the population has syphilis. Um, you know, with some degree uh you know, margin for air there and then uh upwards of in military because event you have younger men who are initially traveling around and they are the ones that are spreading it from

place to place, visiting prostitutes, et cetera. Yeah, and because of it's association with Columbus, who sailed under the Spanish flag, it was called the Spanish disease for a while, and then the French called it the Neopolitan or Italian disease because they caught it from residents of Naples, or should they say when Naples, of course, was one of the

major outbreak areas. The Russians called it a Polish disease, the Polish called it a Russian disease, and the Turks called it a Christian disease, while the English called it the French pox. So what do you see here? A lot of finger pointing, Yes, it's always the other that you blame the disease, and you have to draw that firm line in your worldview between we the clean and they the diseased, and hope that that line doesn't come

to envelop you as well. Um, the the Columbus thing is so fascinating, and it's a it's a it's a point that is continually studied and argued about. But again we see that first big outbreak in and as we all know, in four Columbus sailed the ocean. So it sounds it sounds almost too good to be true, slash too horrible to be treat It almost sounds too easy, But but we keep coming back to it at time

and time. Again, here we have Columbus sailing to this drastically new land and their contact, be it sexual or merely skin on skin is occurring between members of his his crew and the native population. And then they return to Europe, and then in their wake we see the emergence of this, this this powerful illness. Yeah, and you see a lot of wrongheaded ideas about this, this idea of xenophobia, right, this fear of strangers, this idea that there are savages that have uh spread this disease to

Europeans via Columbus. Yeah, you laid with a member of another nation, you laid with a member of another another race. All these these weird taboos spring up and seemingly in concert with the parameters of the illness. As we mentioned before, one of the reasons that syphilis is such a captivating topic is because it's so rife for metaphor, you know, be it a metaphor of morality, of a metaphor of racism, nationalism, sexism, whatever you want to throw at it. It seems to

conform to that that form rather nicely. Yeah, now we will get back to Columbus and we're going to try to get to the origins of of syphilis. But before we do, it's just worth it to say that this is syphilis. And trying to get to the origins of it is really difficult. Um, it's very hard to study.

There are many strains, some of which don't exist anymore, and then you have anecdotal claims throughout the centuries, so you can't really pair that with, you know, a systematic approach to say, yes, indeed, this was a case of syphilis. Because again, as we have mentioned, before. Syphilis is the great imitator. So it's very possible that someone had leprosy and not syphilis exactly. And and again on that difficult to study. Note, you you can't grow syphilis in a culture.

You can't have a little petrie dish of syphilis. Even today, we have to study it in rabbits, so right, you have to have it in an actual organism to really get a good idea about it. That being said, there have been these pre Columbian theories kicked around. In other words, this idea of hey, could syphilis have existed before the New World, previous to the late fourteen hundreds in the

old world. That's again called the pre Columbian theory. Yeah, and this this theory is basically that to say that, well, when we have other illnesses, and if you look back at some accounts of leprosy, you might say, well that that account of leprosy doesn't match up as well with our modern understanding of leprosy. Perhaps that was a different ailment, Perhaps that was in fact syphilis. And instead we're just

kind of latching onto this easy explanation of Columbus. Since this groundbreaking expedition takes place just a few years before this major outbreak. But of course the world good because I mean it makes sense, right, I mean, the world is more complicated than one ship sailing off and coming back. There are other movements going on in the world. It's a time of great change. People are moving around, not only throughout Europe, but you have movements going into into

into Asia and Africa. So what so why not? Why why could there not be another route for this illness to take? And we'll discuss that, we'll really try to get to the bottom of this. But so when we call when we say pre Columbian, we're talking about Old World. When we talk about Columbia and we're talking about New World. Generally here, old world is Europe, Old world is is

Western civilization. New World the America's Columbia, etcetera. Right, And if you're going to talk about New World, you have to talk about something called yaws and facial Now, these are tropical diseases that are closely related to Troponema palladum, which is of course syphilis, although they are different. Bagel causes mouth stores and lumps in the bone, and yaws

caused skin stores and disfiguring growths on the legs. So of course they're they're related to syphilis, but they are non venereal, right, they're spread through skin to skin contact, They're not. They're they're not straight up venereal diseases. Um. You know, granted you could catch them in skin to skin contact during sexual intercourse, but they're not depending on

that as their mode of transmission. Yeah, but these are all trimp and emial diseases that are These are all close relatives of the subspecies of Trimpanema pallatum that causes syphilis. And we bring them up because they're important to study if you're if you're trying to look at where cyphilis, syphilis originated from, then you're gonna want to look at yaws and basil because paleo pathologists Bruce and Christine Rothschild use that information to point toward a new world origin

of syphilis. And they examined six eighties seven skeletons from archaeological sites in the US. We're talking about arranging an age from four hundred to six thousand years and what they found is that populations to the south look to have syphilis while those to the north had yaws. And then by contrast, they examined one thousand Old World skeletons dating to before contact with the New World, and they

found zero cases of syphilis. So this kind of gets you onto the route of, well, maybe the New World did have the case of syphilis, although it's not that clear cut, as well discussed, and this leads us to what is called the Unitarian hypothesis, which has nothing to do with unitarians in the religious sense of the world, where don't worry, unitarians, We're not We're not nailing this one on you. Unitarian in the sense of that that it unites the Old World and New World hypotheses regarding

the emergence of syphilis in Europe. The basic idea here is that you do have Columbus and New sailors setting sail from Europe to the New World to the America's and when they're there, they do come into skin to skin contact sexual and non sexual with natives there, and then they end up acquiring trimpanemal diseases. Now you know, again, think to the jewel, think to to tin, to think to yaws, but not necessarily syphilis proper. But they bring back a relative of syphilis and they bring it back

to a drastically new incubation world. We're talking about a different environment because in the in the America's uh, you know, individuals syphilis they're gonna largely be in you know, smaller communities. But then you bring them to a European port town. You bring it to a world where individuals are wearing more clothes, thus allowing for less skin on skin contact.

You're bringing it to a world where you have brothels, a world where you have tiny ships tightly packed with men sailing from one port to the next port throughout Europe. And what happens, according to this hypothesis is that the the tremponamal disease changes and and we get this subspecies of Tremponema palladum that causes syphilis as we know it.

So it is a story of mutation under new environmental circumstances. Yeah, if anyone is interested in taking a deeper dive into this and and some of the skeletal evidence behind this, there is a paper two thousand and toll paper called the science behind pre Columbian evidence of Syphilis and Europe Research by Documentary and that goes into this, uh much more.

And I wanted to quote Molly Zuckerman. She's one of the authors of paper, and she says, in reality, it appears that venereal syphilis was the byproduct of two different populations meeting and exchanging a pathogen. It was an adaptive event, the natural selection of a disease, independent of morality or blame. Yeah, it's not as situation of, Ah, those sinful sailors are all those diseased natives in this new world. It's it's

something more complicated than that. Yeah. And you know, at the outset of this, the researchers for those paper, they really wanted to to sort of disprove this idea that Columbus and his crew were vectors for syphilis, because I thought, it can't be that just you know, Columbus and his his guys hung out in America and then brought it back to Europe and spread syphilis all over the place. Can't be that simple. And it's not that simple, um, you know, because the trick here is that it mutated,

it adapted rather um. But they really they went into it with the intent of saying, nah, it can't be yeah, because it does sound like something you would read and sort of conspiracy theory kind of message board, right, like, well, these two dates line up, we can correlate this a little bit. Therefore that must be what happened. Um. Now, you know, we do want to drive home that these are all hypotheses and that this is own area that everyone that there are a lot of papers that come

out about this. There's a lot of discussion, a lot of argument, loss did, a lot of disagreement. So there's no definitive answer here, and it may indeed be one of those areas where we never have a definitive answer.

It's true. And uh, you know that the researchers who worked on that paper also worked on some of them worked on a different paper looking at fifty four published reports of pre Columbian evidence and skeletal remains of syphilis, and they found there that again there wasn't enough supporting information and real evidence to say that it existed in its form of syphilis as we know and talk about

it now in the old world. So again, there seems to be some sort of direction here in terms of the way that the river is streaming with information, but it doesn't mean that this is the endpoint of the origins of syphilis. And we're going to talk about more of the sort of sights and sounds and smells of what it might be like in a syphilitic era in Europe.

And uh, I wanted to just read this. This is from the BBC, A Cultural History of Syphilis, says in the fourteen nineties, and apparently new and terrifying disease struck naples in southern Italy and swept fire like across Europe, reaping a dreadful human cost. It must have been as though Hell had come to earth. Pustules spread across the genitals and the face of its many sufferers. Unbearable gastro intestinal pain followed upon fevers, screamingly severe headaches and other symptoms. Finally,

flush fell from bones. Syphilis had arrived in Europe, where it would stay misunderstood, lacking any form of cure for nearly five years. Yeah, that's that's pretty rough sounding. Um. And again, remember that this was not a disease that affected just the poor. This was a disease that affected rich and poor alike, that affected royalty and peasant, that affected clergy members, anyone that was engaging in sexual contact. Uh ran the risk a high risk of acquiring uh,

this this illness. And yeah, this was not a quiet sort of illness. I mean, people could smell you before you even came around. And we're talking about rotting flesh. We are talking about your face bearing the marks of syphilis, your body bearing the marks of it. In fact, you could even kind of see it as a sort of

scarlet letter a brought into your flesh. Yeah. Again, the metaphorical power of syphilis is unavoidable here because you already have the idea, uh, in Western culture, that that physical deformities may signal inner deformities, that that that that an inner sin can have a fleshly manifestation. And it's super easy to apply that line of thinking to syphilis, because

here's something that spread through sex. Here is something that's spread through uh through sin, if you will, and and then has these these terrifying physical um manifestations, certainly in its later stages. So it's it's easy then for someone to point the figure and say this, this is the way. These are the wages of sin right here. All you have to do is look at this individual, look at the look at the sores on their body, look at the deformities of their facial feature, look what has happened

to them? Uh, And and so you see this just throughout it, So throughout its four and a half centuries of unchecked rampaging, and even beyond into the twentieth century and even into the twenty one there's there's a moral aspect to syphilis and to other venereal diseases. This is something you caught because you were doing something that was wrong. Like that's the script that is often applied to the scenario. Yeah, and now people have the sort of calling card hallmarks

of that disease. Right. They look at you and they say, oh, let me see you've you've got a nasty rash there, you lost your hair um, perhaps your nose is even caving in into what's called saddle nose. And so what do people do, Well, they try to find anything and everything that might cover up their transgressions or what would

be perceived as transgressions. Right, And bear in mind again through all of this, that there are no set of standard symptoms for syphilis, and there are stages where it's undetectable. So so every everyone's going crazy with ways to detect and treat it. While the illness itself is is so difficult to get your hands on. It's the great imitator, it's the it's the great hider um. So yeah, bad stuff is happening to your body in in the varying stages of syphilis. So one thing you might do is,

of course, you may cover things up. Since we were wearing clothes, we're wearing makeup. You can apply clothing and makeup to cover up your source. Yeah. In fact, syphilis just creates this whole cottage industry of of different things you can buy and do to either feel better or look better. So there might be some sort of snake oil that you can buy right that has absolutely no

medical merit. Or you might visit your local wig maker quite a bit, because again you want to cover up the bald patch on your head or the baldness so that people don't suspect that you have syphilis. And if you are a prostitute, American is a must, because yeah, you might be saving your pubic care any way to cut down on lights, but then you also might have an outbreak of syphilis down there. You want to disguise the signs, so you get a wig for your genitals,

also called American, which is not a Muppet character. Yeah, they apparently used a lot now in for films, especially historical films. Yeah, but historically it was more a matter of venereal diseases for the men. Generally wasn't really an option because the well there's just more to cover up down there, and uh, just do a Google immed search,

she'll see what I'm talking about. All right, Yeah, there are some logisticks there that you can't quite uh cover with American But what happens when your nose caves in and your flesh begins to rot away, Well, h this creates a problem. And in general it was kind of a rough time for noses anyway. If you remember the story of Tico Brahy, the the astronomer, I think we did an episode on him, or at least he's come

he comes up a time. Yeah, yeah, fascinating individual. Um. There may be some biographers that that creep syphilis in there, but but I think it's pretty established that that he lost the nose in a duel. So on on one level, you can lose that nose in a duel living an adventurous lifestyle, getting yourselves into arguments with other armed a gentleman. But you can also acquire sephilis through your adventurous lifestyle. And then you see the saddle nose, the eventual rotting

away of the nose. So one thing you can do is you can buy a fake nose to where over your destroyed nose. And this is this is as simple as its ounds. If you've ever seen a digital underground video and you've seen Humpty Hump with the big fake nos on his on his face, who incidentally, according to the backstory, lost it in a frying accident, I believe so,

so no dueling or syphilis involved with Humpty. But but it's basically the same scenario, a fake NOS that is strapped onto the body or held with wires over the over the the the vacant area. Yeah, in fact, and this is according to Lindsay fitz Harris, who is a medical historian and writes on the Chiujian Apprentice, which is

a great website documenting medical surgeries. She writes that this deformity was so common amongst these suffering from the pots, as it was sometimes called, that no nose clubs sprung up in London. On February eighteen seventy four, The Star reported Miss Sanborn tells us that an eccentric gentleman, having taken taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited everyone thus afflicted whom he met in the streets to dine on a certain day at a

tavern where he formed them into a brotherhood. And on this site again that Lindsay fitz Harris has put together, there is a great example of one of these sort of noses that's attached to a pair of glasses, that's attached to a sort of almost looks like a headgear, like early headgear braces. And it's one that that a female patient war Yeah, and you can imagine that worn

with a wig, and it makes makes perfect sense. And you know, the no Nose Club also makes a lot of sense because if you're you're dealing with this illness, you're having to cover yourself up and where this this this fake nose over your your your face. I mean, there's gonna come a time when you want to be able to just take that off and be yourself, no matter what has happened to yourself in this illness. You want to be able to just say, hey, here we are.

We may not have noses anymore because of this illness, but hey, we're people, and we want to look at each other like we're people and and not worry about oh whatsever and all these other people that don't have syphilis, or don't realize they have syphilis, or in other stages of the illness are looking at me and judging me for for what I am, and making judgments about my

moral character based on what has happened. Well, and fitz Harris has that blog post Syphilis a Love Story which essentially talks about this, and I believe it is miss Sanborne who eventually takes the fake nose off at her husband's request because he accepts her as she is. You know, it's interesting. I was listening to that to BBC program, the Cultural History of Syphilis, which I'll link to on

the landing page for this podcast episode. But they go into some of the cases of individuals, particularly in the seventeenth century, who end up, if not finding pride in their syphilitic appearance, they at least, you know, come to own it. Uh. You see individuals like Sir William davenant Um sixteen o six through sixteen sixty eight as a poet, playwright, and he was famously not shy about being painted or

depicted in artwork without a false nose. So you see a very sunken saddle nose, you know, almost a vacant um, you know, part of his facial features. And he was, you know, pretty upfront about it. Um. Another instance, you have artist Gerard Delorice one through seventeen eleven, who was actually a prominent painter. Uh and uh and he was

born with congenital syphilis. Um. And he he was. There's actually a painting of him by Rembrandt, which I'll put on the blog for everyone to see because it's it's a it's a Rembrandt piece, so it's it's splendid to behold. But here's an individual who you know, he's setting for a portrait. He's he's he's open and uh and free about who he is. You know, he's not trying to hide it at this point. And you see a number of individuals say um, John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester,

who was portrayed by Johnny Depp in the movie of Libertine. Um. You see individuals like this who basically say, yeah, I have syphilis, I have had a wildlife and the wages of having that wildlife are syphilis. So it's it's almost

like a badge of honor. Yeah, it's like when you hear I've heard people say point at rock stars aging rock stars, and you know, say, oh, they look rough, but they partied hard to get there, you know, to say that, you know, what has happened to them is like a badge of honor because it says they have enjoyed their younger life and that is why, uh, their their older form is so decrepit. And that's what you're

seeing in some of these individuals. Now, granted, these are individuals that we're living at the in the upper echelon of society, so they had a little more room too, you know, to grab onto that pride. They weren't dying of syphilis, uh, you know, in the slums. And likewise, some of these individuals too also had taken to various

um ideas about how syphilis could beach read it. So they thought that perhaps their their syphilis was being treated and managed by regular mercury treatments in one of those mercury steam baths, which, as we mentioned in the previous episode, may you know, was was likely making their symptoms worse. In some cases, so they thought that a they were above sort of some of the social rules in place because of their position and society, and be that they

might have been vanquishing it. So they were uh, not quite as concerned about how they looked. Perhaps, Yeah, and if you're take and if you're looking at the body from a less religious standpoint, and you're looking at more from a hedonistic or even mechanical standpoint, you then you're saying, hey, I live in a world in which syphilis exists, and if I behave a certain way, syphilis is what happens

to my body. You know. Um, some of these cases too, you see individuals where they they're they're they're almost happy when they finally catch syphilis because it means, if nothing else, it means they don't have to worry about syphilis anymore. You know. They're they're they're no longer living in the shadow of syphilis, but within the dark of syphilis. And you can see where there might be a certain amount

of empowerment there. Certainly, if you have to latch onto something, you might as well latch onto that, although again you'd have to be in a really specific social position to

do that, and you'd have to be a male for certain. No. Yes, indeed, now, if you had the money, the wherewithal, and you did not want to wear a fake nose, or you weren't ready to come out to the world that you had syphilis, then you would try a kind of nasal reconstruction, which in the sixteenth century was called the Indian method, and this involved cutting a nose sized section of skin from

the forehead. So there's again another calling card or hallmark that you have the disease, because your nose looks great, but you've got a big patch of skins, but you have a really big wig. That that's true. That's true, you have a nice wig. But they take that skin from the foe and they would attach it to the bridge of the nose to maintain a steady blood supply. And then that flap was twisted into place and sewn over the damaged area, which kind of created a replacement nose.

But again it wasn't perfect, and you know, really cold weather, it would not turn the same color as the rest of your nose. So there were certain telltale signs that it may look like an intech nose, but it is not. Your perhaps knows that you are born with. But it turns out that there's a better and perhaps more horrific way to take a stab at plastic surgery or early

plastic surgery. You know what. It is tempting to say it's horrific, but it but in another way, it's kind of beautiful and it gets it how malleable our flesh really is because again modern plastic surgery, the plastic is referring to the plasticity of the flesh, that you can craft flesh into a form. Yeah. And actually this method did and does inform plastic surgeons of out how skin grows and how you can mold it and and sculpt it. So yeah, in this we see uh, the sixteenth century

advent of the Italian method. Now to to picture this, um, if you don't have an image of it in front of you, um. And and if you're not driving a car doing anything where you need your hands place, place your your palm of your hand, uh kind of on your forehead, okay, and then allow your nose to to touch your arm. That is basically the position where the surgeon would would lock your arm into place. There would be like a head vice type of scenario going on,

so that you could not move your arm away. You cannot move your the flesh of your arm away from the flesh of your face. And then that's where you perform the the the skin graft. You walk a pedicle of flesh, you sort of cut it away from the forearm, and you stitch it into place where the nose should be, in place of the nose that you've lost to syphilis or duels or what have you, and then that's held in place while the the the grafted skin grows onto

the face. So for a brief period of time, you have effectively sown your arm, or a surgeon has effectively sown your arm to your face. And then once the graft has taken then you cut the arm away from it and you've you've essentially walked as a piece of flesh off of your arm onto your face and then use that to form a new nose, which is kind of brilliant. Honestly. You ask a plastic surgeon about this and they'll be like, this is a great way to try to get the skin to graft onto other skin

and then be able to shape it um. The only problem here is that for about two weeks you're walking around with your your hand stuff to your head and you can't really move your nose right because that's now stuck to you your arm. Yeah, I'm guessing you're probably not doing a whole lot of walking around town like that, but but yeah, there's gonna be a weird period there. But you know, the Italian method, it's a remarkable what

it can do. Like it may be summoning images of like a really bad plastic surgery job or something, but I've I've seen some images, particularly like particularly late eighteen hundred's early nineteen hundreds, in which you see multiple pedicles of flesh that are essentially walked up the body to the face to repair individuals who say lost their lower

jaw uh to to two gunshot wound. Uh And then you're able to walk all these pedicles up to the face and it looks kind of ghastly at first, but then you start putting them in their place, and at the end of the of this series of procedures, you have a much more uh normal looking visage uh there

in place of the damage tissue. So in in in this scenario, we see the impact of syphilis on early rhino pass plastic in Europe, but we also see other ways in which syphilis ends up changing the way that that that medicine is practiced uh through throughout the the old world. For instance, immediately it allunge humorism and the

doctrine of contagion. That was probably another day. Um. We also see syphilis as a catalyst for modern doctor patient confidentiality, because suddenly it becomes a kind of a calling card for some doctors. Hey, let me treat you for your syphilist because I'll keep it on the download. Now, we just kind of take that for granted that we go into a doctor, they're not going to blab about syphilis

to everyone in the neighborhood. This is another key fact that was brought up in the book Cleaned by Virginia Smith that have referenced before in podcast, and that is that previously you had you'd go into your your local barber shop and you'd have the barber tonsors in the front of barber surgeons in the back. You can have your haircut, your face shaved, all of that that take place in the front of the building and go into the back, into the yard or what have you. That's

where you would receive minor surgeries. That's where you would uh take a bath, uh and stand later as the as syphilis begins to spread, that's where you start getting treated for civilis that's where you might take your mercury bath. And so the prevalence of the disease and fear regarding the disease, this really leads to regulation. This really this leads to of course, you know, paranoia. And so you see the two separates. So you see the separation of

the barber tonsor and the barber surgeon. It's right because that red and white striped barber pole used to indicate that there are surgeries done there. Right in case anybody's ever wondered why, um, that pole is outside of a hair cuttery, all right, So that's this impact on on on medicine, in medical surgeries, um, as well as cottage industries like wig makers, right, and people who are are

selling you know, snake oils. But there are certain things that you cannot cover up here when it comes to syphilis. And one of the things would be your teeth. Now, you could pull all your teeth, you could put denters in, but if you didn't want to do that, you're kind of saddled with the ravages of your teeth bicyphilis. Yeah, and one of the more one of the more particular things we see here with the teeth is something that pops up in cases of congenital syphilis, and that's something

known as Hutchinson teeth. These are, you know, as with all things syphilis, the exact symptoms vary, but this is often typified by sharpened looking teeth or peg shaped teeth that kind of have sharpened points on the edges. Um. You can look for for image of this online. I think I had, and actually I did a blog post um that I'll link to on the landing page for this podcast episode that includes, uh, the image that Julian and I are both looking at now. But they do

have a kind of monstrous appearance. These are like sharpened teeth inside of a human mouth, particularly canine teeth. Yes, And so we start to look at this for a little bit, and uh, naturally you your mind would turn to vampire teeth because that's kind of what this looks like. It looks like a sort of non sperato version of

vampire teeth. Yeah, And it's led us some commentators to argue that the the evolution of the vampire myth in in Western civilization may have connections to cases of congenital or hereditary syphilis. The children are born like this, they have this kind they could have in addition to these teeth, they may also have elongated fingers, they may have elongated skull.

There various other deformities that might be interpreted as monstrous by by somebody taking in the scenario um and another connection between vampires and syphilis arguably takes us to brom Stoker himself, the author of the book A Dracula. And another area where vampires and syphilis seem to converge uh is in the case of the eight novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Now brom Stoker's exact cause of death and he died in nineteen twelve, it remains, you know, somewhat

something of a mystery. But some biographers a tribute as death to tertiary syphilis and make the further argument that Dracula itself, as a literary work is is kind of reflecting not only the paranoia regarding syphilis that's present in the culture, but also Stoker's own uh experience with the illness itself. Because you look at vampires, you look at tracula and you see uh, something that is at once

sexual and monstrous. You see this this uh, this outsider that has come to in this case to England and is spreading this uh, this illness of vamporism. This uh, this this alien pathogen to to to to two women in the in the in the area. Yes, they are puncturing the women. Right. So again you have to use

that metaphor which always comes up sex and vampires, right. Um, In fact, there is You send me this link to a class that's offered the says the Vampire in Literature and Cinema, taught by Tommys slav Lojnovich, who is a professor of Slavic and comparative literature, and he uses that vampire lore to explore folklore explanations of disease epidemics, Which makes sense, right, especially if you're you're caught up in this.

You'll say, it's the sixteenth century, is the seventeenth century, and this is this pervasive disease and you have all of these sort of myths surrounding it. It's possible that that people could sort of extrapolate like maybe there are vampires, maybe this is how it's being spread. Yeah, because again four and a half centuries in which we could not cure it. So you're throwing what you can at. You're throwing, you're throwing actual research, you're throwing snake oil, you're throwing mercury,

steam baths, you're throwing religion. And again, you know, because again it just can't be It can't be overstated, the the connection between between morality and en syphilis here and at least in the way that that people tried to understand it, or at least ended up viewing it in society. And so yeah, you're throw in a little myth in there, you throw a little magical thinking and and and there you go. You can easily see the vampire emerged. Nothing

concrete there, but some food for thought. Yeah, which maybe why a vampire in the form of Count spiro Keet shows up in a Navy video in the seventies talking about STDs. Right, Yes, and you can watch this. I linked to the video on a blog post I did for Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's actually a fabulous documentary. It's kind of the style of of Schoolhouse Rocks and uh, and it has a Scooby Doo element to it as well. Yeah,

it's it's very silly. Look. Even when they get into some of the rougher stuff, such as congenital syphilis or or actually showing illustrations of genitals, it's like the setup is very cartoon. It's Death himself is having an awards ceremony handing out the coveted fourth Horseman Award for a disease that's that's done the best work in causing misery and death around the world. And who should win it but count spirow Keet, who represents syphilis. Uh, the the

embodiment of gnaia takes some issue with it. Some of the other illnesses are like, what's so great about sparrow keyt,

what's he doing? There's a cure for it, blah blah blah, and so Death and spirow Keet, mainly Death goes on to explain to us why how selphialist works and why it is a problem, and why enlisted navy men, why why sailors should be on guard and should go seek treatment for any time they have any kind of a flare out, which kind of gets into this whole rich tradition of the military trying to bring a level of

awareness of STDs to UH to everyone. In fact, if you go back to War one in wor World two, UH, you will see all sorts of pamphlets and posters warning military members to be very careful to watch out for SIFF, watch out for ganaia. And it even remind me of our quarantine episode in which we talked about the U. S. Military quarantining prostitutes in an attempt to try to separate what they thought is disease carrying prostitutes with STDs from

military members. Yeah, so you have you have these campaigns that are basically in essence saying, hey, sailors, when you go into the next port town, please stay away from the prostitutes because you could catch syphilis and it's bad news. And you have to bear in mind too that even after the advent of penicillin, you'll have situations, particularly in wartime, where there's there's not an unlimited amount of penicillan to

throw at at your your navy men's venereal diseases. You have, you have that a lot of that penicilla is earmarked for the battlefield for for use in helping with soldiers have been injured in combat. You don't want to spend it all just on a bunch of horny sailors who can't control themselves when they go into a farm port of call. So they're throwing education at the problem as well. But there's speaking to a male audience, and and so the messaging tends to take on a very sexist feel. Yeah.

In fact, one of the posters which I'm looking at right now is a really good example. It's this, Um it's a photograph of a girl that looks, you know, kind of innocent and pure and you know, very Norman Rockwell, like this is the Norman Rockwell cow. I'm looking at very Norman Rockwell. In fact, she has this sort of beatific smile on as if you know she's doing godly work. And then there are you know, some servicemen who are

looking at her at a distance. And across this poster it says she may look clean, but and the butt isn't an all red and all caps, and it says pick ups good time girls. Prostitutes spread syphilis and gonorrhea. You can't beat the axis is if you get v D. And at what I think is so interesting about this is that there are many other posters that have more I don't know what you say, tawdry looking women that

there are basically saying their prostitutes. But then you have this other sort of like I said, be to fix smiled, innocent looking girl. And the point is, as you say, is that they're speaking to men, and um, they're really underscoring this idea that STDs veneral, that Jesus all begin with women, and that they are the font of evil. Yeah. I mean there's this darkness in the woman. It's almost like the like the feminine form as monster is the message here and and you see again you do see

some more fantastic, horrific visions of this. There's one where the woman is like moving a handheld mask away from her face and behind it there's a death skull. Um. The Salvador Dollis illustration that he did for an anti syphilis poster in which you see the two buxom women. Yeah, I guess it kind of melting kind of, but they look like a death skull. You know. It's one of those one of his classic style images where you see the death's head uh in the form of the women.

I'll be sure to throw that on stuff to your mind dot com as well. So everyone can see it. And yeah, weren't you telling me about the sixteenth century hypothesis of the woman as really the germanator of syphilis. Yeah, yeah, there was this notion that to syphilis emerged because you had you had women, you had prostitutes who were having sex with multiple men. Uh, and then those semens would those different seeds would be inside her and they would

mingle together and corrupt into the form of syphilis. So with and you know, they had no one there was no proof to back up this ridiculous theory, but it did place the blame firmly on on women and very moralistically as well. These women are are sinning and therefore you have sickness arising from them. They are the source of of the ailment itself. Yeah, and uh, not not to get too crazy here, but it just kind of

brings me back to this idea of witches. And we talked about which is and we talked about, you know, the power of women and sexuality. And again here we are subscribing this sort of power, this death to women in the form of syphilis. And uh, you know, I don't know that that's what all the poster artists intended, but it certainly captured the spirit of the times. Yeah, and and again they were talking to a predominantly male audience.

As we mentioned before, even in UH, you know, over the centuries that syphilis was really ravaging Europe, you saw the highest percentages of infection uh in the in the in the soldiers are certainly a higher percentage than in the rest of the population. So soldiers and prostitutes were a key area of transference. Indeed. All right, so there

you have it again. There's just there's not enough time and even in a series of podcasts to really get into all the ways that's syphilis informed UH Western culture during its UH four and a half centuries of unchecked life. But but hopefully we hit some of the high points. We hit some of the ideas who were play here about about us versus the other, about men and women, about the morality, about the cosmetics of dealing with syphilis, and if nothing else, that should serve as an interesting

starting point for your own exploration of the topic. And also touching um the origin of it as well, and knowing that we don't have the end all be all theory in place yet, but we do have an idea of where it came from all right, Um, you guys can find us a multitude of places. Yeah, that's right. Go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That

is the mothership. You will find all the blog posts, the podcast, the videos, etcetera, including a number of different items related to this Symphilist series that we've put out for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff works dot Com three year