We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices." The experiments were led by physician John Charles Cutler who also participated in the late stages of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Names
It was first called grande verole or the "great pox" by the French. Other historical names have included "button scurvy", sibbens, frenga and dichuchwa, among others. Since it was a disgraceful disease, the disease was known in several countries by the name of their neighbouring country. The English, the Germans, and the Italians called it "the French disease", while the French referred to it as the "Neapolitan disease". The Dutch called it the "Spanish/Castilian disease". To the Turks it was known as the "Christian disease", whilst in India, the Hindus and Muslims named the disease after each other. References
Further reading
Ghanem KG, Ram S, Rice PA (February 2020). "The Modern Epidemic of Syphilis". N. Engl. J. Med. 382 (9): 845–54. doi:10.1056/NEJMra1901593. PMID 32101666. S2CID 211537893. Ropper AH (October 2019). "Neurosyphilis". N. Engl. J. Med. 381 (14): 1358–63. doi:10.1056/NEJMra1906228. PMID 31577877. S2CID 242487360. External links

"Syphilis - CDC Fact Sheet" Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
UCSF HIV InSite Knowledge Base Chapter: Syphilis and HIV Archived 20 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine
Recommendations for Public Health Surveillance of Syphilis in the United States 
Pastuszczak, M.; Wojas-Pelc, A. (2013). "Current standards for diagnosis and treatment of syphilis: Selection of some practical issues, based on the European (IUSTI) and U.S. (CDC) guidelines". Advances in Dermatology and Allergology.
It then began to appear in adults who were unable to fend off the infection because they had never been exposed as children, and they readily spread it via sexual contact to other adults who also had limited or no resistance, causing deformity and death where before it had been only been a temporary childhood ailment. This transition is reported to have coincided temporally with the return of the Columbus expedition from the New World. The most compelling evidence for its validity is the presence of syphilitic-like damage to bones in a number of adult skeletons found in the British city of Hull who were buried over a century before Columbus made his journey to the Americas.More recent analysis of that research, however, concluded in 2012 that syphilis almost certainly had a New World origin.The causative organism, Treponema pallidum, was first identified by Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann, in 1905. The first effective treatment for syphilis was arsphenamine, discovered by Sahachiro Hata in 1909, during a survey of hundreds of newly synthesized organic arsenical compounds led by Paul Ehrlich. It was manufactured and marketed from 1910 under the trade name Salvarsan by Hoechst AG. This organoarsenic compound was the first modern chemotherapeutic agent. During the 20th century, as both microbiology and pharmacology advanced greatly, syphilis, like many other infectious diseases, became more of a manageable burden than a scary and disfiguring mystery, at least in developed countries among those people who could afford to pay for timely diagnosis and treatment.