Yaws leaves lesions on the skin and bone. Bejel aff ects the
skin, bone, and cardiovascular system. Venereal syphilis in-
volves skin, bone, the cardiovascular system, and the nervous
system. It may severely dampen human fertility through mis-
carriages and stillbirths of infected fetuses. Congenital cases
of yaws and nonvenereal syphilis are rare. Bones lying close
underneath the skin may have lesions through spread of in-
fection from adjacent skin lesions. Joint destruction is seen
in yaws but not in syphilis. Paleopathologists have concluded
that venereal disease originated in the Americas, because
skeletal evidence of syphilis in the New World predates the
same sort of evidence in Europe.
See also astronomy; cities; death and burial practices;
food and diet; health and disease; inventions; lit-
erature; natural disasters; religion and cosmology;
settlement patterns; social organization; towns and
villages; trade and exchange; war and conquest.
FURTHER READING
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: Th e Fates of Human Societ-
ies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
Mirko D. Grmek, Diseases in the Ancient Greek World, trans.
Mireille Muellner and Leonard Muellner (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Jacques Jouanna, Hippocrates, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Baltimore.
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
Kenneth F. Kiple, ed., Th e Cambridge World History of Human Dis-
ease (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Doubleday,
1976).
John F. Nunn, Ancient Egyptian Medicine (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1996).
John F. Nunn, “Disease.” In Th e Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient
Egypt, vol. 1, ed. Donald. B. Redford (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
John F. Nunn, “Medicine.” In Th e Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient
Egypt, vol. 1, ed. Donald. B. Redford (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
Robert Sallares, Th e Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Mary Ellen Snodgrass, World Epidemics: A Cultural Chronology of
Disease from Prehistory to the Era of SARS (Jeff erson, N.C.: Mc-
Farland, 2003).
John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker, eds., Disease and De-
mography in the Americas (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1992).pandemics and epidemics: further reading 829