The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe

Sweeping across Renaissance Europe, the Great Pox brought to its victims on the continent a slow, agonizing, and disfiguring death. Based on a wide range of contemporary sources, this book is the first detailed account of the new plague-known to later generations as syphilis-and reactions to it in Italy, France, and Germany, where each society struggled to meet the challenges of the frightening new epidemic.