A recent scholarly paper by Timken Zinkann stated that "we rarely find works of art which we can connect directly with syphilis” in contrast to plague and other diseases. The same paper contained a group of examples that were new to me. Since then I have found more in older sources; and I am back to the impression typical of most of these chapters that one could keep digging and keep finding more.

Not that every shovelful is rewarding: one turns up tin cans and old shoes as well as nuggets. The Columbus theory is rampant, forcing the idea that nothing could have been syphilis in Europe before his time, but that anything in America might have been.

For example, on the second point: there is a disappointing photograph of a black, presumably earthen figure entitled "Syphilitic woman with her child," a piece of Mochica art from the northern coast of Peru dating from the fourth century A.D., reproduced in a book on medicine in art, edited by J. Rousselot. The picture shows what may represent a saddle nose, the Hat bridge that Shakespeare knew, a mark of late congenital syphilis. But it is the mother in this figure, not the child, who shows the defect. The text speaks of mutilation of upper lips and noses, evidently done with a knife and attributable at least in part to sacred and punitive incisions. This nose might well have been mutilated rather than diseased. The child's nose looks healthy to me in the photograph of the figure. Its teeth are not clearly shown and are not mentioned in the text. But the mother shows her upper front teeth, and there is nothing syphilitic about their squareness. This single observation would be in accord with the conclusion of the writer previously mentioned who found nothing clearly identifiable as syphilis in a detailed study of pre Columbian American sculpture.

On the other hand, there is a drawing in black and white, reproduced in the same book from a Persian treatise on surgery dated about 1300 A.D., called "Cauterization of leprosy lesions," by an anonymous draftsman. Its three figures are stylized, with a doctor squatting at the right with his cautery in his extended hand, and what I take to be two images of the same patient, back and front, nude but for turban, with spots symmetrically in the front view on body, face, legs, arms, feet, and especially on what would be the backs of the hands. The rear view, if that is what it is, shows only a row of spots along the middle of the backbone, and perhaps two more in the midline of the neck. The text suggests that the drawing had been recopied several times, so that it may have undergone changes. The evidence is not enough to diagnose syphilis; but it seems to me more likely to have been syphilis than leprosy. (see VENEREAL DISEASES IN THE GRAPHIC ARTS PART II)