Syphilis had many different names . . . Because of the outbreak in the French army, it was first called morbus gallicus, or the French disease. In that time it is noteworthy that the Italians also called it the “Spanish disease”, the French called it the la maladie anglaise - the English disease and “Italian” or “Neapolitan disease”, the Russians called it the “Polish disease”, and the Arabs called it the “Disease of the Christians”. (source: Wikipedia).

Well, according to The Chambers Dictionary, the name “syphilis” was originally the title of a poem written in Latin by Girolamo Fracastoro in 1530 whose hero, Syphilus, had the disease. Fracastoro was an Italian physician, poet, astronomer, and geologist—a contemporary of Galileo—who proposed a scientific germ theory of disease more than 300 years before its empirical formulation by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Indeed, he put forward the idea that diseases are like seeds that can be transferred from one person to another.

He wrote a poem entitled ‘Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus’ and devised a myth, giving the name syphilis to a fictional shepherd. The poem describes how Syphilus (‘pig lover’), a pastoral shepherd is stricken with syphilis, albeit somewhat harshly given the circumstances, for having ‘offended’ Apollo:

A shepherd once (distrust not ancient fame)
Possest these Downs, and Syphilus his Name;
Some destin’d Head t’attone the Crimes of all,
On Syphilus the dreadful Lot did fall.
Through what adventures this unknown Disease
So lately did astonisht Europe seize,
Through Asian coasts and Libyan Cities ran,
And from what Seeds the Malady began,
Our Song shall tell: to Naples first it came
From France and justly took from France his
Name…

On sixteenth-century representations of syphilis in poetry, see Margaret Healy’s “Anxious and Fatal Contacts: Taming the Contagious Touch” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).