At the time the causative agent was unknown but it was well known that it was spread sexually and also often from mother to child. Its association with sex, especially sexual promiscuity and prostitution, made it an object of fear and revulsion and a taboo. The magnitude of its morbidity and mortality in those centuries reflected that, unlike today, there was no adequate understanding of its pathogenesis and no truly effective treatments. Its damage was caused not so much by great sickness or death early in the course of the disease but rather by its gruesome effects decades after infection as it progressed to neurosyphilis with tabes dorsalis. Mercury compounds and isolation were commonly used, with treatments often worse than the disease.There is some evidence to suggest that syphilis was  a common childhood skin disease in the Old World, and did not originate in the New World. According to this hypothesis, syphilis was a mostly benign infection like chicken pox which for thousands of years had been common among the young who transmitted the disease among themselves—and as adults, they gained immunity and could not be reinfected. Once living conditions in Europe began to change and certain social classes began to practice greater hygiene, syphilis was driven out of the age group in which it was harmless.
Anisomelia is a genus of moths in the family Geometridae described by Warren in 1895. == References ==