The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

Early modern Europeans were the first in Europe to know venereal syphilis, which was likely brought to Europe from the Americas. Contemporaries claimed the Columbus’s voyages transported the disease to Europe, and Arawak mythology contains references to the illness, which suggests it had a long history in the Americas. This evidence supports the Columbian theory of syphilis’s origins in the Americas. Scholars, however, have put forth competing theories on its origins.

The Unitarian theory, for example, holds that venereal syphilis is “merely a syndrome of a disease which has always been worldwide,” though its symptoms vary (141). Venereal syphilis is the same illness as the disease called yaws, bejel, pinta, or irkinja in other parts of the world. The Unitarian school holds that all these maladies are manifestations of tremonematosis, which exhibits different symptoms depending on climate and cultural distinctions. The disease first appeared in sub-Saharan Africa as yaws, which impacts the surface layers of skin due to the climate. As humans dispersed throughout the world, they took the disease with them, and it changed. In dry regions, it manifested as bejel, an illness that mainly affects children in regions of Southwestern Asia. As hygiene progressed, the disease “retreated even deeper into the human body, into the bones and arteries and nervous system” (143), where it eventually manifested as a sexually transmitted infection.