Syphilis

Syphilis presents us with a new disease, or what was believed to be a new disease when it first appeared in Muslim societies, beginning in the late fifteenth cen­tury. Syphilis and other European diseases were intro­duced into the Middle East in the early modem period by Europeans, who also brought their own methods of treatment.

In the early sixteenth century, whooping cough and syphilis were reported, for example, by the Per­sian Baha ad-Dawla. In one of his works he de­scribes, in considerable detail, “the Armenian sore” that had spread from Europe to Constantinople and Arabia. Reportedly, syphilis had appeared in 1498 in Azerbaijan, and then in Iraq and Persia. Because of some symptomatic similarities with smallpox, it was known as “European pox” or “little fire.” It was also confused with anthrax or ignis persicus. Baha ad-Dawla observed the rash, sore throat, and neu­ral involvement of the disease. He recommended purges, venesection, and appropriate foods and drugs, and he referred to European physicians, whom he did not mention by name. He recom­mended a salve known as the “European pox medi­cine,” which he believed could restore health if prop­erly employed. Baha ad-Dawla did not say what the salve contained, but he mentioned a few lines later that mercury could be given in an electuary. An­other of his recipes and one of the European physi­cians also contained mercury.

According to Leo Africanus, who wrote in the first half of the sixteenth century, syphilis was brought to North Africa by Jews driven out of Spain, and it spread rapidly among the Berber population.

8. Among the unhappy events of that year, an evil known as “the French pox had appeared among the people... the doctors were powerless in the face of this disease that had never appeared in Egypt before the beginning of this century; countless people died of it.”

Naturally, the indigenous physicians took cogni­zance of the new disease, and it is discussed in the medical textbook of Dawud ibn Umar al-Antaki, who wrote in the later sixteenth century and was perhaps the last great Arabic medical author in the Greek tradition. His textbook displays an intriguing mixture of hallowed Greco-Arabic medicine and the first indications of exposure to European learning, even in matters as small as the Western names for the months of the year.

More important, al-Antaki gives the earliest medi­cal description of syphilis in Egypt in his chapter on carbuncles. He says that syphilis was popularly called “the blessed” in Egypt as a way of avoiding a mental association with the disease and contamina­tion. As for treatment:

If one mixes mercury with frankincense, resin, wax, and oil and uses it as an ointment and if the patient is covered warmly for a week and eats proper and unsalted food, he recovers after suffering gangrene of the mouth, salivation, and tumefaction of the throat. If he becomes cold, he will feel pain in the joints. The ointment should be used three times a week. It is a well-known treatment in the hospital of Cairo. Sometimes one begins by applying the ointment to the extremities and the neck and only after a purge.

Interestingly, al-Antaki provides the entire mercury treatment for syphilis in his textbook as it was prac­ticed in Europe until the eighteenth century.

The broader context in which al-Antaki worked is presented by Prosper Alpin in his description of medi­cal practices in sixteenth-century Egypt.

In the long term, the appearance of these new dis­eases, in addition to periodic reappearances of plague, and the measures taken against these dis­eases by all the foreign European communities helped to diminish traditional Muslim opposition to the notion of contagion. Thus, in the seventeenth century, Evliya Chelebi, a renowned Turkish trav­eler, described the contagion of syphilis in Cairo quite matter-of-factly. The seventeenth century also wit­nessed clear evidence of the new age of European medicine, when Ibn Sallum, physician to the midcen­tury Ottoman sultan Mehmet IV, wrote his medical textbook. In this work Ibn Sallum not only described the new illnesses - for example, chlorosis, syphilis, scurvy, and Polish plait (plica polonica) - but an alto­gether new system of medicine, namely the “chemical medicine of Paracelsus.” Although the Paracelsian system was erroneous and Ibn Sallum’s influence may have been slight, the work clearly marks the advent of European medicine in the Middle East. With the introduction of Western-style medical schools in Cairo and Istanbul in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the ascendancy of Western medicine was assured. All of this, however, was to the detriment of many traditional values and native forms of healing.

Michael VK Dols