Blaming the Neighbours: what Europe called Syphilis
When syphilis swept Europe after the 1495 Naples outbreak, no nation would own it — each named the disease after a neighbour or enemy. This interactive map traces who blamed whom, with every arrow coloured by the name a population actually used.
Overview
The first recorded European outbreak of syphilis struck Naples in 1495, among the army of Charles VIII of France. From that moment the disease became a diplomatic weapon: no population would admit it had started at home, so each named it after a neighbour, a rival, or an invading army. The result is a near-complete map of early-modern European grudges. This interactive map draws an arrow from every population to the country it blamed, with the arrow’s colour encoding the name they used — so “the French disease” (used by a dozen nations) reads as a single colour fanning in toward France.
Methodology
The naming relationships were compiled by hand from medical-history and lexicographic sources (listed below) into a single sourced table, then encoded as a directed graph. Each edge stores the blamer, the blamed party, the exact name used (with the vernacular term), and a citation. The map is built in JavaScript with D3.js: countries are placed at real [lon, lat] anchors on a Mercator projection over a Natural Earth basemap (world-atlas TopoJSON), and blame is drawn as quadratic-bézier arrows whose curvature uses a fixed handedness — so reciprocal pairs (France ↔ Italy, France ↔ Spain) bow to opposite sides instead of overlapping. Clicking a legend colour isolates one name. The data table beneath the map is generated from the same edge data.
Findings
- “The French disease” dominates — Italy, Germany, England, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Poland, Malta, Croatia, Bohemia, Portugal and Scotland all blamed France.
- Blame was reciprocal — France pointed back at Naples (“Neapolitan disease”) and also at Spain (“Spanish disease”).
- Poland blamed three ways — Germany, France, and (per several sources) the Ottoman Turks.
- Croatia blamed itself — the Škrljevo and Župa diseases are named after Croatian places, not a foreign country.
- No intra-Nordic blame is recorded, and the Baltics coined no distinct name of their own.
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Contested or omitted: the French “British disease” (a likely misattribution) and the Irish gallbholgach (“foreign pox,” we Irish seem to have missed an opportunity to blame this on the English).
- The data table also has some non European blame someone else examples.
Takeaways
The naming of syphilis is a centuries-old case study in how societies displace blame for a stigmatised threat onto outsiders. The same impulse to name a disease after “them” recurs in later epidemics.
Data Sources
Ratings use the ODON Open Data Maturity Model (ODMM).
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Tampa et al., 'Brief History of Syphilis', J Med Life (2014)
Legal L4 Open-access peer-reviewed article (PMC). Free to read and quote with attribution. L4.
Technical T2 Narrative prose; the naming relationships were transcribed by hand into a structured table rather than parsed from a machine-readable file. T2.
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Wikipedia / Wiktionary, 'History of syphilis' & 'syphilis'
Legal L4 CC BY-SA text, free reuse with attribution. L4.
Technical T2 Encyclopaedic prose; relationships transcribed by hand. T2.
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JMVH, 'Syphilis – Its early history and Treatment until Penicillin'
Legal L4 Published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) — free reuse with attribution. L4.
Technical T2 Available as a web article (HTML); no structured or machine-readable download provided. T2.
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History Today, 'Pox and Paranoia in Renaissance Europe' (Cummins, 1988)
Legal L2 Published in a commercial magazine (1988). Copyright has not expired (UK/EU: life + 70 years). No open licence stated; article is readable on the website but not licensed for reuse. L2.
Technical T2 Available as a web article (HTML); no structured or machine-readable download provided. T2.
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Surgeons' Hall Museums, 'The attempt to exile syphilis sufferers to an island near Edinburgh'
Legal L2 Museum blog post. No open licence stated; copyright held by the institution. Readable online but not licensed for reuse. L2.
Technical T1 Informal blog post (WordPress); no structured format, metadata, or download available. T1.
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Vesmír, 'Syfilis v Čechách' (1996)
Legal L2 Published in a Czech scientific magazine (1996). Copyright has not expired; no open licence stated. Article is readable in the online archive but not licensed for reuse. L2.
Technical T2 Available as a web article (HTML) in the magazine's online archive; no structured download provided. T2.
Tools Used
- TopoJSON (Natural Earth)
- JavaScript
- D3.js