For some time after syphilis broke out, it was believed, both by medical men and by the non-medical public, that the disease was communicable, and constantly communicated from the infected to the healthy by the employment of the clothes, vessels, baths, etc., used by those already suffering from it, and by the slightest corporeal contact, or even by inhaling the same air with them. I might appeal on this head, if it were necessary, to the individual and general testimony of Schilling, Torella, Brandt, Massa, and almost every other early continental author, historical or medical, who mentions the first outbreak of syphilis. Some even thought that neither the presence of infected persons, nor of fomites, was always absolutely requisite. In his work, _De Morbo Gallico_, published in 1551 (above half-a-century after the disease commenced), Benedict Victorius, of Fienga, like most of his contemporaries, still maintained that “the state of the air” (to use his own words), “together with that of the putrid humours, are sufficient to beget the affection;” and in strong confirmation, he adds, “I myself happened once to know some honest and religious nuns, who were confined in the strictest manner, and yet contracted the venereal disease from the peculiar state of the air, together with that of the putrid humours, and the weakness of their habit of body.” The same belief in the easy contagion of syphilis without contact or intercourse extended to our own country. It was, in particular, strongly believed that the malady could be propagated from the sick to the healthy by the medium of the breath. One of the gravest articles of guilt brought against the celebrated Cardinal Wolsey, when he was arraigned before the English House of Lords in 1529, was the allegation that (to quote the _ipsissima verba_ of the indictment, as laid before Henry VIII.), “whereas your Grace is our Sovereign Lord and Head, in whom standeth all the surety and wealth of this realm, the same Lord Cardinal, knowing himself to have the foul and contagious disease of the great pox, broken out upon him in divers places of his body, came daily to your Grace, rowning in your ear, and blowing upon your most noble Grace with his perilous and infective breath, to the marvellous danger of your Highness, if God of his infinite goodness had not better provided for your Highness. And when he was once healed of them, he made your Grace believe that his disease was an impostume in his head, and of none other thing.”[619] The notion that the breath of persons having the venereal disease was infectious seems to have prevailed as late as the reign of William and Mary. Dr. Oates, in his _Picture of the late King James_ (1696), says,—“Tom Jones, your quondam chaplain, was afraid to go to old Sheldon, for fear he should give him the pox by breathing on him.” (Part II. p. 106.)