Faith is always most desired and most urgently needed where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive mark of sovereignty and strength. That is, the less someone knows how to command, the more urgently does he desire someone who commands, who commands severely - a god, prince, the social arder, doctor, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience.

- The Joyful Science

Self-possession in the face of sickness, Montaigne believed, was crucial. Physicians were of little use: 'no doctor takes pleasure in the health even of his friends,' he remarked.

- The Greatest Benefit To Mankind

Between 1518 and 1531, perhaps one third of the total native American population died of smallpox, while the Spanish hardly suffered.
With allies like microbes, the Europeans did not require many soldiers or much military acumen.

Guns and germs enabled small European bands to conquer half a continent in what might be called, to echo Gibbon, another victory of barbarism over civilization.

The wholesale destruction of indigenous New World populations continued for over three hundred years; twenty million slaves had to be shipped to America to fill the vacuum, causing cruelty and suffering on a scale not matched until the regimes of Hitler and Stalin.

The story of Syphilis:

Columbus may have brought one killer disease back from the Americas: syphilis. This broke out in 1493-4 during a war between Spain and France being waged in Italy. When Naples fell to the French, the conquerors indulged in the usual orgy of rape and pillage, and the troops and their camp-followers then scattered throughout Europe. Soon, a terrible venereal epidemic was raging.
It began with genital sores, progressing to a general rash, to ulceration, and to revolting abscesses eating into bones and destroying the nose, lips and genitals, and often proving fatal.
Initially, it was called the 'disease of Naples', but rapidly became the 'French Pox' and other terms accusing this or that nation:
the Spanish disease in Holland, the Polish disease in Russia, the Russian disease in Siberia, the Christian disease in Turkey and the Portuguese disease in India and Japan. For their part, the Portuguese called it the Castilian disease, and a couple of centuries later Captain Cook (1728-79), exploring the Pacific, said that the Tahitians 'call the venereal disease Apano Britannia - the British disease' (he thought they'd caught it from the French).

- The Greatest Benefit To Mankind

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يكلك هلكد ما السفلس جان خطير ومخوّف الناس بأيام قبل، جانوا يجربون وياه علاجات خطيرة تكاد تكون بنفس سوء المرض.
مثلًا جانوا ينطون للمرضى زئبق (ويسببون الهم تسمم مزمن بالزئبق) حتى يقتلون بكتيريا السفلس ويعالجوه.
أو ببداية القرن الـ 20 جانوا يعالجون السفلس عن طريق إصابة المرضى عمدًا بالملاريا لأنها تسببلهم حمى عالية بما فيه الكفاية لطبخ بكتيريا السفلس بداخل جسم المريض وبالنتيجة علاجه.

جزء جبير من الرعب اللي يسببه السفلس هو أنّه حرفيًا "ياكل" اللحم والغضاريف والعظام. يعني هواي مرضى تشوف عدهم قروح تمتد من الجلد وصولًا للعظم، كأنما أكو أحد حافرها عمدًا.