syph·i·lis
noun A chronic infectious disease caused by a spirochete (Treponema pallidum), either transmitted by direct contact, usually in sexual intercourse, or passed from mother to child in utero, and progressing through three stages characterized respectively by local formation of chancres, ulcerous skin eruptions, and systemic infection leading to general paresis.
Origin: New Latin, from “Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus,” “Syphilis, or the French Disease,” title of a poem by Girolamo Fracastoro (1478?-1553), from Syphilus, the poem's protagonist.
Word History: In 1530 Girolamo Fracastoro, a physician, astronomer, and poet of Verona, published a poem entitled “Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus,” translated as “Syphilis, or the French Disease.” In Fracastoro's poem the name of this dreaded venereal disease is an altered form of the name of the hero Syphilus, a shepherd who is supposed to have been the first victim of the disease. Where the name
Syphilus itself came from is not known for certain, but it has been suggested that Fracastoro borrowed it from Ovid's
Metamorphoses. In Ovid's work Sipylus (spelled
Siphylus in some manuscripts) is the oldest son of Niobe, who lived not far from Mount Sipylon in Asia Minor. Fracastoro's poem about Syphilus was modeled on the story of Niobe. Fracastoro went on to use the term
syphilis again in his medical treatise
De Contagione, published in 1546. The word that Fracastoro used in Latin was eventually borrowed into English, being first recorded in 1718.
