A disease with no accepted origin
When syphilis spread through Europe in the late 15th century, people had no reliable way to trace where an infection began. The disease could pass between sexual partners, while its symptoms might appear well after exposure. That delay made the chain of transmission hard to see—and easy to replace with a story about outsiders bringing the danger in.
There was no shared medical explanation to settle the question. Before germ theory, people could observe illness but could not identify the microorganism that causes syphilis or map how it moved from person to person. Competing names therefore recorded suspicion, not evidence of a disease’s birthplace.
Naming shifted the blame
Calling syphilis by a neighbor’s name turned an unsettling illness into someone else’s fault. The label drew a boundary between “us” and “them,” especially when the disease carried sexual stigma: blaming foreigners could make infection seem like an imported threat rather than a risk within one’s own community.
The names also changed as they crossed borders. Each community could pass responsibility onward, so a disease’s label depended less on where it truly originated than on who was doing the naming. The result was a map of political suspicion, not a map of transmission.
