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Page: Etymology
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The name "syphilis" was coined by by the Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro in his epic poem, written in Latin, entitled Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (Latin for "Syphilis or The French Disease") (1530). The protagonist of the poem is a shepherd named Syphilus (perhaps a variant spelling of Sipylus, a character in Ovid's Metamorphoses). Syphilus is presented as the first man to contract the disease, sent by the god Apollo as punishment for the defiance that Syphilus and his followers had showed him. By the addition of the suffix -is to the root of Syphilus, Fracastoro derived a new name for the disease, which he also used in his medical text De Contagionibus ("On Contagious Diseases") (Girolamo Fracastoro, De Contagionibus, Venice 1584, p. 106). Until that time, as Fracastoro notes, syphilis had been called the "French disease" in Italy and Germany, and the the "Italian disease" in France (ibid., p. 91). In addition, the Dutch called it the "Spanish disease," the Russians called it the "Polish disease," the Turks called it the "Christian disease" and the Tahitians called it the "British disease."
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