xxvi INTRODUCTION

emphasize his conviction that the morbus Gallicus was not
brought to Europe from the New WorId, he relates how, soon
after this recital, ships arrive with the prodigious news that the
disease is now ravaging all Europe, and no remedy can be found.
Aecordingly the Spaniards freighted their ships with the wood
and imported it into Spain,' whence its use spread to France,
Germany, South Russia and Italy. Fracastorius prays Apollo
to preserve his poem, ^for our descendants may one day like
to read of the signs and appearance of this disease. It will
come again. May Bembo read and approve my verses.??

'Derivation of Syphilis

Fracastorius nowhere explains why he called the herdsman
(pastor) in his poem, Syphilus, and the precise meaning of the
derived word syphilis has been much debated by modern writers.
The popular view that it is compounded of the Greek ös
(Swine' and d(Aöos, 'dear', (i. e. 'dear to swine', a suitable name
for a herdsman, or 'fit for swine', implying moral reprobation)
is questionable for two reasons: 1) Syphilus is not described as
a& swineherd, but as a shepherd and cowherd, and swine are
mentioned once only in the poem, in a list of animals slain at
the memorial banquet that follows the expiatory ritual of the
islanders witnessed by Columbus; in that rite it is a calf, not a
pis, that is slain as a substitute for a human victim. 2) In the
poem, the names Syphilus and syphilis always have the first
syllable long. Now the few compounds that exist in Greek
and Latin of ös and sus have the first syllable short, as Fracas—
torius must have known, and he writes sues in the only place
in the poem where that word occurs. An error in quantity
would have been detected by a scholarly critic such as Bembo,
and could have been easily altered in the revised version that
we possess. As for moral reprobation implied in the word
syphilis, it is enough to say that nowhere in the poem is there
a hint that the malady is venerea!; and though in our prose

: It was said, in the 16th cent., that the wood had been brought
over first by a Spanish officer who had been cured by it in the New
World. Fracastorius thus apostrophises the tree huyacus:

8Salve, magna Deum manibus sata semine sacro,
Pulehra comis, spectata novis virtutibus arbos:.
Spes hominum, externi decus et nova gloria mundi.