Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Before the discovery of Treponema pallidum as the etiologic agent, the origins of syphilis have been the subject of several debates.
Diverse therapeutic agents were employed in an attempt to cure the disease. Examining the milestones in the history of syphilis, the present article reviews the existing theories that tried to explain the origins of the disease, the approach in art, the cultural and the evolution of the treatments from the empiric means to the discovery of penicillin.
Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by Treponema Pallidum, a bacterium classified under Spirochaets phylum, Spirochaetales order, Spirochaetaceae family, but there are at least three more known species causing human treponemal diseases such as Treponema pertenue that causes yaws, Treponema carateum causing pinta and Treponema pallidum endemicum-responsible for bejel or endemic syphilis. The four members of the bacterial family cannot be differentiated with morphological, chemical or immunological methods [ 1 , 2 ].
Of the aforementioned bacteria, syphilis is the sole sexually transmitted treponemal disease, as the other conditions are transmitted via direct contact with an infected individual [ 3 ]. From the very beginning, syphilis has been a stigmatized, disgraceful disease; each country whose population was affected by the infection blamed the neighboring and sometimes enemy countries for the outbreak. Moreover, in Northern India, the Muslims blamed the Hindu for the outbreak of the affliction.
However, the Hindu blamed the Muslims and in the end everyone blamed the Europeans [ 4 - 6 ]. The affliction spread to the whole population, including King Alcithous. The nymph Ammerice counseled the inhabitants to offer Apollo further sacrifices, one of which was Syphilus himself, and also to sacrifice to Juno and Tellus, the latter offering the people the tree of Guaiac Guaiacum officinale , a very used therapeutic medicine in times of Fracastoro [ 6 - 8 ].
