Comment on There was an attempt...
meduz@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I suggest more primary source research should be done about this claim before drawing such maps. Speaking for Polish, I was not able to find any primary or even reliable secondary sources that claim anything about it being “turkish disease” (choroba turecka). I’ve also been unable to find anything about it being a german disease outside of modern or foreign sources which don’t quote where they got that term from.
Now… For the french one, and what I primarily suspect to be the most solid argument here is the fact that in most of Europe this started in Greek as “sys - philos”, so literally “swine loving”, which in 1530 was subtitled as “morbus gallicus” (french disease). Is that because they hated the French, or perhaps because the french were calling it Neapolitan disease because they had an outbreak of the disease in Naples in 1495…
I cannot speak for claims in other languages, but I encourage you, if you speak a language, to do some digging to validate these claims. It’s interesting how English-speaking sources are claiming something and there’s no sources on it. Other than the french argument, how many of those can be validated?
AbsolutelyClawless@piefed.social 1 week ago
I can confirm that for Croatia it’s accurate to a point. At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century two separate towns had an outbreak of syphilis, and therefore the disease was named after these two places locally. From my understanding, in both cases the disease was mostly transmitted due to poor hygiene, and not much through sexual contact. In the second town, aside from the aforementioned, a bunch of kids and their families were infected because the local doctor vaccinated the kids against pox using materials from an infected child, unintentionally.