Although the Columbus story keeps recurring like the refrain of a song, the opposite theme is heard now and then in an authoritative quarter. Here, for instance, is what Charles Singer, a noted historian of science and medicine, says in the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1937). I give the whole paragraph, which is all Singer says of the subject in the article "Medicine, History of." It seems to me remarkable how simply he makes the point, yet how little conviction his words might carry to one already committed to the reverse:

“To one infectious disease, syphilis, we must refer more particularly. During the middle ages there had smouldered in various districts an obscure disease known frequently as lepra. Toward the end of the 15th century this disease broke out in epidemic form all over Europe, causing great destruction of life. It received various titles, such as "the pox," "the French disease," "the Spanish disorder." Only tardily was it recognized that it was of venereal origin. In 1530, on the suggestion of Fracastoro, it received the cognomen syphilis. From the time of its recognition, syphilis had been pursued by a portentous mass of confused literature. Alarm, misunderstanding, religious feeling, false modesty, wilful misrepresentation, and the change in type of the disease itself, have all contributed their quota of obscurantism and fable to a naturally difficult subject. Fracastoro did something to bring order out of the confusion.”

Among students of the history of syphilis the one who seems most painstaking in his scholarship is Dr. Frederic Buret of Paris, who had the misfortune to write a few years too soon, in 1889. Bacteriology was then in its early adolescence. The great victories of maturity in public health were a decade or more in the future, and none of the important discoveries in syphilis on cause, diagnosis, and cure had yet been made. The clinical art was by then highly developed, and Buret was obviously an excellent clinician as well as an accomplished linguist and scholar. But if he could have waited he might have avoided diagnostic errors that weaken what is otherwise a definitive case. He is unmistakably partisan. He charges his fellow Frenchman Awestruck with responsibility for fastening the Columbus "legend" on the world more than 250 years after the event. Buret would have us believe that few took the Columbus story seriously before Awestruck's time. Yet again allowing for errors, admitting that Buret often identifies as syphilis what we can now distinguish easily as something else, he nevertheless amasses instance after instance which can hardly leave the unprejudiced reader in doubt that syphilis was indeed known to ancient China and Japan, to the Hebrews, the Hindus, the Greeks and Romans, and continuously in Europe through the Middle Ages and down to the years " preceding the voyages of Columbus. Both it’s venereal and its congenital aspects were recognized from the beginning. It was often confused with leprosy and called by a profusion of misleading names. But the indurated (hard) chancre was known, as were the spots and figlike sores of secondary syphilis and the destructive lesions of late syphilis.