In any case the new disease spread with terrifying speed. Caesar Borgia apparently contracted it in France. Many cardinals, and Julius II himself, were infected; but we must allow the possibility, in such instances, of infection by innocent contact with persons or objects bearing the active germ. Skin pustules had long since been treated in Europe with mercurial ointment; now mercury became as popular as penicillin is in our day; surgeons and quacks were called alchemists because they turned mercury into gold. Prophylactic measures were taken. A law of 1496 in Rome forbade barbers to admit syphilitics, or to use instruments that had been employed by or on them. More frequent examination of prostitutes was established, and some cities tried to evade the problem by expelling courtesans; so Ferrara and Bologna banished such women in 1496, on the ground that they had “a secret kind of pox which others call the leprosy of St. Job.”38 The Church preached chastity as the one prophylaxis needed, and many churchmen practised it.
The name syphilis was first applied to the disease by Girolamo Fracastoro, one of the most varied and yet best integrated characters of the Renaissance. He had a good start: he was born at Verona (1483) of a patrician family that had already produced outstanding physicians. At Padua he studied almost everything. He had Copernicus as a fellow student, and Pomponazzi and Achillini to teach him philosophy and anatomy; at twenty-four he was himself professor of logic. Soon he retired to devote himself to scientific, above all medical, research, tempered with a fond study of classic literature. This association of science and letters produced a rounded personality, and a remarkable poem, written in Latin on the model of Virgil’s Georgics, and entitled Syphilis, sive de morbo gallico (1521). Italians since Lucretius have excelled in writing poetical didactic poetry, but who would have supposed that the undulant spirochete would lend itself to fluent verse? Syphilus, in ancient mythology, was a shepherd who decided to worship not the gods, whom he could not see, but the king, the only visible lord of his flock; whereupon angry Apollo infected the air with noxious vapors, from which Syphilus contracted a disease fouled with ulcerous eruptions over his body; this is essentially the story of Job. Fracastoro proposed to trace the first appearance, epidemic spread, causes, and therapy of “a fierce and rare sickness, never before seen for centuries past, which ravished all of Europe and the flourishing cities of Asia and Libya, and invaded Italy in that unfortunate war whence from the Gauls it has its name.” He doubted that the ailment had come from America, for it appeared almost simultaneously in many European countries far apart. The infection
did not manifest itself at once, but remained latent for a certain time, sometimes for a month… even for four months. In the majority of cases small ulcers began to appear on the sexual organs…. Next, the skin broke out with encrusted pustules…. Then these ulcerated pustules ate away the skin, and… infected even the bones.… In some cases the lips or nose or eyes were eaten away, or, in others, the whole of the sexual organs.39
The poem goes on to discuss treatment by mercury or by guaiac—a “holy wood” used by the American Indians. In a later work, De contagione, Fracastoro dealt in prose with various contagious diseases—syphilis, typhus, tuberculosis—and the modes of contagion by which they could be spread. In 1545 he was called by Paul III to be head physician for the Council of Trent. Verona raised a noble monument to his memory, and Giovanni dal Cavino graved his likeness on a medallion which is one of the finest works of its kind.
Before 1500 it was usual to class all contagious diseases together under the indiscriminate name of “the plague.” It was one measure of the progress of medicine that it now clearly distinguished and diagnosed the specific character of an epidemic, and was prepared to deal with so sudden and virulent an eruption as syphilis. Mere reliance on Hippocrates and Galen could never have sufficed in such a crisis; it was because the medical profession had learned the necessity of ever fresh and detailed study of symptoms, causes, and cures, in an ever widening and intercommunicated experience, that it could meet this unexpected test.
And it was because of such high qualifications, devotion, and practical success, that the better class of physicians was now recognized as belonging to the untitled aristocracy of Italy. Having completely secularized their profession, they made it more respected than the clergy. Several of them were not only the medical but as well the political advisers, and the frequent and favored companions, of princes, prelates, and kings. Many of them were humanists, familiar with classical literature, collecting manuscripts and works of art; often they were the close friends of great artists. Finally, many of them realized the Hippocratic ideal of adding philosophy to medicine; they passed with ease from one subject to another in their studies and their teaching; and they gave the professional philosophical fraternity a stimulus to subject Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas—as they subjected Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna—to a fresh and fearless examination of reality.
IV. PHILOSOPHY
At first glance the Italian Renaissance does not seem to offer a reasonable harvest of philosophy. Its product cannot compare with the heyday of French Scholasticism from Abélard to Aquinas, not to speak of “the school of Athens.” Its most famous name in philosophy (if we extend the time limit of the Renaissance) is Giordano Bruno (1548?-1600), whose work lies beyond the period of our study in this volume. Pomponazzi remains; but who now does reverence to his poor heroic skeptical squeak?
The humanists incubated a philosophical revolution by discovering, and cautiously revealing, the world of Greek philosophy; but, for the most part, and excepting Valla, they were too clever to lay their beliefs on the table. The university professors of philosophy were hobbled by the Scholastic tradition: after spending seven or eight years struggling through that wilderness, they either abandoned it for other fields of study, or drove another generation into it, glorifying the hurdles that had broken their wills and brought their intellects to a safe dead end. And who knows but many of them felt a certain mental and economic security in confining themselves to recondite problems carefully and fruitlessly phrased in unintelligible terminology? In most philosophical faculties Scholasticism was still de rigueur, and already stiffening with the approach of death. The old medieval questions were laboriously reviewed in the old medieval forms of disputation, and in the proud publications of the staff.