If the true syphilis—the variety that appeared in the fifteenth century—was unknown in the Middle Ages, there still exist documents which fully affirm the existence of contagious venereal diseases several hundreds of years before the Italian wars of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. The maladies which, in times of antiquity, afflicted the Hebrews and Romans, as a result of impure sexual commerce, are to-day only the results of the progress made by prostitution after the Crusades; that is to say, they are merely the products of debauchery and leprous virus imported from the Orient. As early as the twelfth century France knew the _mal malin_ or _mal boubil_, an affection characterized by sores and ulcerations on the arms and genital organs. Gauthier de Coinci, Prior of the Abbey of St. Medard de Soissons, at the beginning of the thirteenth century considered these maladies as impure and contagious, and warned his priests in the following verselets: “The monk, the church clerk and the priest Must not defile themselves the least, But with good conscience and pure heart Keep their hands off from private part. Pray God at morning and at night To hide corruption from their sight; The _mal boubil_ the _mal malan_ Comes ever to each sinning man.” We are permitted to suppose from these lines that the disease was localized in “a wicked place that the hands must not touch,” and that it was only an affection of the same nature as the _gorre_ and _grand gorre_, one of the numerous expressions applied to all contagious maladies of the sexual organs. This fact cannot be contested, for at the same epoch, in a poem entitled “_Des XXIII Manieres de Vilains_,” we find an imprecation launched by this anonymous author against all blackguards and bawds: “That they may be Itchy, poxed, and apostumed, Covered with ulcers, badly rheumed, Full of fever, jaundice sapped, That they may be, also, clapped.” Or, as given in French: “Qu ils aient ... Rogne, variole et apostume, Et si aient plente de grume, Plente de fievre et de jaunisse, Et si aient la chade-pisse” Now, the opuscle, from which these verses are derived, was reprinted in 1833 by Francisque Michel, and is contemporaneous with the manuscripts of the thirteenth century, analyzed by M. Littre in _a note on syphilis_,[31] where our erudite author says: “At this epoch the venereal diseases had an analogous form to those we observe to-day.”