Shortly after Christopher Columbus and his sailors returned from their voyage to the New World, a horrifying new disease began to make its way around….

Even more than this, however, the sick - like lepers - were often reviled because people believed that they had brought their torments upon themselve….

Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab; in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the libra….

Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived wh….