Hutten, Ulrich von b.April 21, 1488; Burg Steckelberg (R,hon) d.August 29, 1523;Ufenau Island in Lake Zurich
Ulrich von Hutten, German humanist, poet, and the first prominent victim of syphilis, which was perceived as having come from the New World.
(Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbuttel)German humanist and knight of the Holy Roman Empire, correspondent of Erasmus and poet laureate of the Holy Roman Empire who actively advocated the German Reformation. Best known to posterity for defending Johannes Reuchlin in Epistolarum obscurorum virorum (Letters of Obscure Men), Hutten was famous in his lifetime for his book De Guaiaci Medicina et morbo gallicus liber unus (Of the Wood Called Guaiacum, 1519). It confirmed his status as the most prominent early European victim of syphilis. An epidemic of syphilis was introduced to Europe by Spanish sailors after 1492. Initially, victims suffered from syphilis maligna, a virulent strain rare today except in HIV patients. Treatments were poisonous: application of mercury salve or inhalation of mercury vapor. Hutten proposed treatment with the bark of lignum vitae, a South American tree (Guaiacum officinale), claiming it cured him of what he called “the French disease.”
Hutten contracted syphilis in Leipzig (1508). He failed to describe the chancre of primary syphilis. His early writings, which characterize the disease as a stroke of fate, indicate symptoms of secondary syphilis: fever, chills, and lesions. By 1512 he limped and suffered joint pain. Although he reported a cure to Erasmus in 1515, by 1516 symptoms returned. Over ten years he undertook eight mercury cures. In 1518 his health improved after treatment with lignum vitae. After publication of his book, Hutten wrote dialogues Febrisprima, Febris secunda, Fortuna (First Fever, Second Fever, Fortune) attributing illness to loose living; fever is used as a metaphor for punishment and bad luck.
Hutten instrumentalized the metaphor of illness in attacks on the Catholic Church. By 1521 his condition worsened. Political views made the vagabond knight an unwelcome guest. After failure to find refuge, he withdrew to the care of a healer on an island in Lake Zurich in August 1523, where he finally died. The acute cause of death possibly stemmed from nerve palsy (typical of tertiary syphilis), which hindered swallowing. Researchers exhumed Hutten’s remains in 1968, confirming syphilitic infections of the femur, tibia, and left foot.De Guaiaci Medicina reveals awareness of the American origins of the disease and transmission through sexual intercourse. (Noting that genital lesions are visible, Hutten urged men to examine sexual partners.) The book offers astrological explanations for the disease and explains it via the Galenic humors. Hutten described an earlier airborne strain characterized by acorn-sized pustules and odoriferous pus, but suggests victims now suffered from small, dry-crusted, hard pustules (similar to modern symptoms). He discussed syphilis’s effects on the bones, bladder, stomach, and liver, along with paralysis or stroke. Hutten claimed mercury treatments were palliative but that the only certain treatment was lignum vitae. The tree bark was hydrated for twenty-four hours and reduced to half its volume over at least six hours by boiling. For treatment, the patient remained in an airtight room. He or she ingested two glasses of unadulterated brew daily with a laxative and no food. Lesions were smeared with the brew’s foam. The patient lay covered in bed and was brought to sweat. Total treatment lasted forty days; feeding resumed after twenty. Patients were advised to avoid stimulation and abstain from intercourse.
Hutten was advised by personal physicians of the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz in the book’s details. Paracelsus doubted the cure. Still, De Guaiaci Medi- cina was quickly translated into German (1519), French (1520), and English (1533), and its conclusions included in important sixteenth-century medical works. Hutten’s claims were accepted until the 1560s, experienced an eighteenth-century revival, and were considered a possible treatment in European medical treatises until the mid-nineteenth century.
Susan R. Boettcher
References and Further Reading
Allen, Peter Lewis. “The Just Rewards of Unbridled Lust: Syphilis in Early Modern Europe.” In The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present. Ed. Peter Lewis Allen. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000.
Holborn, Hajo. Ulrich von Hutten and the German Reformation. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.
Hutten, Ulrich von. Of the Wood Called Guaiacum. Tr. Thomas Paynell. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilm Service, 1939, Early English Books 1475-1.