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Medieval smith11/21/2023 Salmon tells us that a common symptom of congenital syphilis is interstitial keratitis, an eye inflammation causing clouded vision. A clue for the missing princes projectĪs a syphilitic, Edward risked having children born with the disease. Edward IV’s reputation as a sexual adventurer helped confirm the diagnosis. She says, “I surmised that this comment probably meant something about a sexually transmitted disease” because in medieval times, to go fishing was a euphemism for sexual intercourse. Long fascinated by symbolism in medieval art and literature, Salmon recognized Mancini’s story as a metaphor. He said the ailing king died after he caught a cold while fishing with some of his courtiers. Salmon noted, too, another odd comment by Dominic Mancini, an Italian at the court of Edward IV. And then there was the matter of the fish For medieval elites who were protected from repeated low exposure by their lifestyle, the danger of contracting syphilis was considerable. As she explains, “This odd statement fits only one disease, treponematosis, which behaved differently when contracted by peasant children sharing drinking vessels or clothing (as occurred in the endemic form of the disease, bejel) and previously uninfected adults having intercourse with diseased partners (as occurred in the venereal form, syphilis).” The reason has to do with bacterial load, with bejel resulting from small numbers of the spirochete entering the body from time to time, while in syphilis the primary chancre on the genitals contains a massive and usually fatal inoculation. Long described as opaque by historians, this cryptic statement points clearly to syphilis when read with an understanding of the various strains of treponematosis, Salmon says. To do that, she turned to documents describing Edward’s death, specifically a statement by an anonymous chronicler that the king had died of an “unknown” disease not easy to cure even in a man of “lesser status.” Salmon knew it was important to distinguish between treponemal syndromes in her analysis. The Maastricht Hours, Liège, Low Countries, first quarter of the fourteenth century. McLaren and Dennis Penney, “The Reconstruction of the Syphilitic Saddle Nose: A Review of Seven Cases,” British Journal of Plastic Surgery 10 (1957–1958), fig. Left: Man with a collapsed nasal bridge, front view. Conventional wisdom, however, held that it was impossible, syphilis having arrived in Europe only after 1493 with the men who sailed with Columbus. ![]() Based on her ongoing research, she believed that syphilis caused the death of the late medieval King Edward IV in 1483. A women’s historian with an interest in the history of disease, including syphilis, she had been studying the deaths of English royals for decades. When Salmon learned of Baker’s call, she was ready. Surely, they noted, such a “reviled and feared” disease should have elicited contemporary comment. put out a call for traditional documentary and artistic evidence. To move the field forward while waiting for definitive evidence from aDNA research, Baker et al. ![]() (There are three syndromes of treponematosis recoverable from teeth and bones: syphilis bejel, usually found in dry climates and yaws, usually found in the tropics.) ![]() Yet the important goal of distinguishing between treponemal syndromes remains elusive. (See their “ Advancing the Understanding of Treponemal Disease in the Past and Present,” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology.) Baker and other leaders in the field finally declared the issue settled. Over the last decade, however, instances of skeletal remains with damage symptomatic of treponemal disease have appeared more often in the literature. Some historians have long believed that treponematosis existed in medieval Europe, but paleopathologists (who work with teeth, bones, and aDNA) lacked the evidence to prove it. (The full article, “ Evidence for the Presence of Treponemal Disease, Including Syphilis, in Late Medieval Europe,” appears on pages 37-87 of Vol.
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