Even the vehemence with which our cleverest contemporaries get lost in pitiful nooks and crevices such as patriotism (I refer to what the French call chauvinisme and the Germans 'German'), or in petty aesthetic creeds such as French naturalism (which enhances and exposes only the part of nature that simultaneously disgusts and amazes), or in Petersburg-style nihilism (meaning faith in unbelief to the point of martyrdom), always indicates primarily the need for faith, a foothold, backbone, support.

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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