With reference to the origin of this pestilence--the venereal disease, there are various opinions. When it broke out in the French army at Naples A.D. 1495, the French called it ‘the disease of Naples,’ and said that at the siege of that place there were certain merchants who barrelled the flesh of men slain in Barbary, which they sold for tunny! and that from such food the disease originated. It is certain that cannibals are much infested with the venereal disease. It was known in England before 1162, and was called ‘Brenning’ or ‘Burning.’ This appears from Bishop Winton’s records of the public stews. The disease is well described by one Arden, who was surgeon to Richard II., in 1156, in a work expressly written on the subject. A.D. 1495, King Don Fernando convoked the Cortes in the city of Tarragona, in consequence of the pestilence raging at Saragossa: it was attended by buboes, carbuncles, &c.; and in the following year, 1496, it appeared in a petechial form among the soldiers employed in Granada. Syphilis also prevailed at Naples amongst the troops of Charles VIII. In the year 1496, an epidemic ulceration, as it was then called, of the skin (epidemic scurvy), invaded the inhabitants of Germany, Portugal, Ireland, and other countries. A.D. 1497, Barcelona was again visited by epidemic pestilence: it made its appearance about the 18th of July, and continued until November. Gaspar Torella, a native of Valencia, physician and domestic prelate to Alexander VI., wrote a work upon the Morbus Gallicus, which was printed at Rome, according to Haller’s account, in the year 1497. Astruc makes mention of another work, entitled ‘Ex Coitu cum Impurâ Muliere.’ In the year 1498, Francisco Lopez de Villalobos, physician to Charles V. and to his son Philip II., published in Salamanca a folio work entitled ‘Sumario de la Medicina.’ Juan de Banos, in the first ten numbers of his ‘Voyages of the Portuguese to the East Indies,’ gives a circumstantial account of a pestilence which seized on the crews of their fleet after they had passed the Cape of Good Hope. The malady commenced with erysipelas and putrescence of the gums, so that those who were attacked were unable to take food; their bodies were racked with excruciating pains, and the stench from them was intolerable. This disease was evidently scurvy.