Diseases Abroad

DISEASES ABROAD

The Body's largest organ is the skin. Before modern medicine, one of the worst imaginable skin diseases was Syphilis, which would start as itchy boils and then eat it's way into the bones until it exposed the skeleton. The microbe that caused this disgusting sight and unbearable pain had different names in different  places. In Russia, it was the Polish disease.In Poland, it was the German disease; In Germany, the French disease; and in France, the Italian disease. The Italians blamed black, calling it the French disease.

The instinct to find a scapegoat is so core to human nature that its hard to imagine the Swedish people calling the open sores the Swedish disease, or the Russians calling it the Russian disease. That's not how people work. We need someone to blame and if a single foreigner came with the disease, then we would happily blame a whole country. No further investigation required.