Syphilis 1) Mystery, Death, and Succeed. That carried Syphilis to Europe and the world. About almost five hundred years ago (489), a professor named Hieronymus Fracastorius was investigating a weird disease that was spreading around Europe. Now also, he was writing an epic poem about a shepherd, called Syphilus, who insulted the Greek god Apollo, because he preferred to adore the king instead of the god. So, Apollo represented like a sun, punished the whole kingdom with a new horrible disease. After that, many people and the same Hieronymus linked Syphilis with the new virus. 2) Now, we don't know the origin of it. But, there're two popular hypotheses: Pre-Columbus and Columbus hypothesis. The second one says that when Columbus landed to Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, Syphilis was already present there. Indeed, this fact has obtained relevance over the last years, due to scientist have already discovered skeletons and skulls with symptoms of Syphilis that date from more than eight hundred years ago, in other words, before the trip of Columbus. According to that, Syphilis is from the New World. 3) I'm going to tell you a story. This tale has two bands: the French Army of twenty-five thousand soldiers, and the Italian Army of just one thousand soldiers. On the first battle, the French Army won, so they made a big, filthy and messy party. However, in the second battle, they noticed strange eruptions in the French Army, more terrifying than leprosy. That's the first record of syphilis in Europe at 1495. 4) Four hundred year later, Paul Ehrlich, a German biochemist on the vanguard of pharmaceutical researches, developed a theory to explain the formation of antibodies, to fight the toxins released by the bacteria. Co-working with the Japanese bacteriologist Kiyoshi Shiga, they created "the Magic Bullets", a chemotherapy solution to fight Syphilis. Then, Paul won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his theory, that was going to be a valued precedent to post- researches. Postcard: It's a PowerPoint presentation. Each paragraph represents a slide.