Another picture in Rousselot is entitled "Josaphat as a child, meeting a leper and an old cripple at the gates of Jerusalem". It is dated mid fourteenth century. Here the alleged leper has spots on every exposed skin surface face, neck, ankles (not clearly shown), and hands, including what is seen of the palm of the extended right hand, which is grasping a clap per. Today, only somebody committed to the fifteenth century origin of syphilis could be comfortable calling this leprosy.

Albreht Durer made a well known woodcut entitled "The Syphilitic," to illustrate what is said to be the first printed medical article on the disease, a broadsheet by Diedrich Ulsen, town physician of Nuremberg. It is easy to agree with the opinion of a recent writer that the drawing is uninspired; and in fact its poor quality, with perhaps the additional fact that it lacks the master's usual monogram, has led to doubt of its authenticity. It shows the figure of a man with spots described as "ulcers" but drawn as irregular rings, much as our contemporary satirist David Levine draws what must be freckles. In the presumed Durer the spots are shown on all parts of the body not covered by hat, cloak, and boots. The face wears an expression vaguely sad or disdainful, perhaps in line with Fracastor's suggestion of the characteristic melancholy of syphilis. There are spots on the extended right palm. Above the figure is a sphere bearing the zodiac and marked 1484, the date of the great conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. I have not seen the accompanying verses by "the Frisian doctor Ulsenius."

Durer is said to have revealed in some of his letters that he had a mortal dread of syphilis, and there are suggestions here and elsewhere that he may have had it himself. He abandoned his wife a few weeks after he married her in 1494. He made a drawing a year earlier of a nude female bathhouse attendant in Strasbourg, the earliest known German drawing of a nude woman from life, so that he was evidently familiar, as Timken Zinkann says, with "houses which later proved to be hotbeds of luetic infection." Some of his finest works in this early period (1494 1503) deal with a theme that might have been related to syphilis, that of "Woman, Death, and the Devil," one of which, "Young Woman attacked by Death," appears to represent a rape. It is described by the same author as bordering on the obscene: "No German artist prior to Durer dared to show such a subject and to shock the viewer in such a manner."

But a most significant as well as excellent work of Durer's not only furnishes one of my best exhibits but supports the idea that the artist was himself syphilitic, and had by this time passed into the late stage. It is a three quarter length nude self portrait done with pen and brush with white highlights, showing an abnormal left testicle (right in the mirror image), which has been identified as a syphilitic fibrosis, something now rare but well known and clearly identified with syphilis before 1900. The drawing was evidently made for purposes of consultation at a distance. A better known self portrait sketch by Durer shows him pointing to a circled area on the left side of his abdomen (again, in the drawing, the right side). A handwritten inscription above is translated as reading, "There, on the yellow spot, where my finger is pointing, is where my pain is." One assumes that the doctors of the period could do about as well with the sketch of a fine draftsman as with the patient in the flesh.