In Renaissance Europe, people spent a considerable amount of time grumbling about syphilis—and, typically, blaming the scourge on foreigners, near and far. “From the very beginning, the disease was associated with the French, and its most common name was therefore Mal Francese or Mal Francioso, on the grounds that the French army was responsible for bringing this, among other calamities, to Italy,” write medical historians Jon Arrizabalga, John Henderson, and Roger French in The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe. (Florentine writers also dubbed it “French boils,” they…
