\^OL. XXXI.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 46/ 



imaginable; for it is liardly to be expected that 1 in 10, to whom this accident 

 happens, should ever go right, it being next to an impossibility that the ends of 

 the torn ligament should be so exactly placed and retained as not to lie over 

 each other. 



On the Antiquity of the Vejiereal Disease. By Mr. William Beckett Surgeon, 



F.R.S. N'^sas, p. 47. 



My principal design in this letter, is to prove that the venereal disease was 

 frequently known among us some centuries before the siege of Naples; but I 

 shall first endeavour to refute the opinion of those persons, who believe it to 

 have had its rise there, if any such remain of those who have read my former 

 letter.* It is true that several modern authors have asserted it ; but I shall 

 make it appear to be an error as inconsiderately, and hastily received, as started 

 by some chimerical author ; who, because several writers about that time, ob- 

 serving the disease to begin in the pudenda, separated it from another, with 

 which it was before confounded, must likewise take upon him to assert its be- 

 ing a new distemper, and to assign a certain time and place for its rise. Now 

 one might with good reason expect, that if the disease had its origin there, it 

 must have been so certainly known, that there could have been no doubtful 

 opinions about it; but that the physicians, who resided in or near the place, 

 and those more especially who interested themselves so as to write of it, must 

 all of them have agreed on the certainty of a thing, the truth of which was so 

 easily attainable. But on the contrary, Nicholas Leonicenus, the first Italian 

 physician who wrote on this disease, and who lived at the time when Naples 

 was besieged, is so far from acknowledging it to have had its rise there, from 

 the French soldiers' conversation with the Italian women, and so little did he 

 know of its true cause, that he does not even allow it to be the consequence of 

 impure embraces. It was likewise about this time, that Pope Alexander the 

 6th engaged Gaspar Torella to write of this distemper ; and this author is so 

 far from allowing it to have had its origin there, that he tells us the astrologers 

 were of opinion, that it proceeded from I know not what particular constella- 

 tions. Neither does Sebastianus Aquilanus, who lived at that time, allow it to 

 be any other than an ancient disease ; or Antonius Scanarolius, who wrote in 

 1498, which was but 4 or 5 years after that siege. Nor do several other authors, 

 then living, say one word about this Neapolitan story. But it seems Ulricus de 

 Hutten, a German knight, who was no physician, positively affirms this disease 

 to have had its rise there; but how he should come to know this, who lived at 



* Page 368 of this volume of these Abridgments. 

 3 2 



