Syphilis
Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
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What Is Syphilis?
In 1530, an Italian poet produced a poem in which he said that a shepherd called syphilis pissed off the god Apollo and that this disease was his punishment. And of course, we've got astrological reasons. There's a wonderful, wonderful broadsheet from 1496 by a New Renberg physician illustrated by Albrecht Dure. In it, you can see this little sort of zodiac thing above it with the date 1484. It was thought that this was when you had this devastating conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Scorpio. I knew it would be a Scorpio that did this. Yeah, it's all Scorpio's fault. This was the foretelling of
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