really a new disease, though popularly supposed to be so, but an
old disease which has broken out with hitherto unknown violence.
There is, however, no conclusive reason for believing that
syphilis was known at all in classic antiquity. A.V. Notthaft
("Die Legende von der Althertums-syphilis," in the Rindfleisch
_Festschrift_, 1907, pp. 377-592) has critically investigated the
passages in classic authors which were supposed by Rosenbaum,
Buret, Proksch and others to refer to syphilis. It is quite
true, Notthaft admits, that many of these passages might possibly
refer to syphilis, and one or two would even better fit syphilis
than any other disease. But, on the whole, they furnish no proof
at all, and no syphilologist, he concludes, has ever succeeded in
demonstrating that syphilis was known in antiquity. That belief
is a legend. The most damning argument against it, Notthaft
points out, is the fact that, although in antiquity there were
great physicians who were keen observers, not one of them gives
any description of the primary, secondary, tertiary, and
congenital forms of this disease. China is frequently mentioned
as the original home of syphilis, but this belief is also quite
without basis, and the Japanese physician, Okamura, has shown
(_Monatsschrift fuer praktische Dermatologie_, vol. xxviii, pp.
296 et seq.) that Chinese records reveal nothing relating to
syphilis earlier than the sixteenth century. At the Paris Academy
of Medicine in 1900 photographs from Egypt were exhibited by
Fouquet of human remains which date from B.C. 2400, showing bone
lesions which seemed to be clearly syphilitic; Fournier, however,
one of the greatest of authorities, considered that the diagnosis
of syphilis could not be maintained until other conditions liable
to produce somewhat similar bone lesions had been eliminated
(_British Medical Journal_, September 29, 1900, p. 946). In
Florida and various regions of Central America, in undoubtedly
pre-Columbian burial places, diseased bones have been found which
good authorities have declared could not be anything else than
syphilitic (e.g., _British Medical Journal_, November 20, 1897,
p. 1487), though it may be noted that so recently as 1899 the
cautious Virchow stated that pre-Columbian syphilis in America
was still for him an open question (_Z