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When Nahum Tate published Syphilis: or, A Poetical History of the French Disease, this 1686 publication was the first translation among more than twenty-five editions of Girolamo Fracastoro's famous Neolatin poem. 1 Within the next decades Jacob Tonson and John Dryden included the work four times in their Poetical Miscellanies, and for over two centuries this translation remained the most widely read English version of Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus. 2 Modern prose translations have since displaced the usefulness of Tate's editions, 3 but they have not diminished the significance of his achievement. Though the 1400 lines of verse may no longer merit the prominence they long enjoyed, Tate's initial decision to translate the poem, as well as the translation itself, offers valuable literary and medical insight into the seventeenth-century understanding of the arts of poetry and medicine. Tate's dedicatory poem to the surgeon Thomas Hobbs establishes these arts initially in terms of an opposition between the physician and the poet. His address to the man who had rapidly risen from the position of surgeon in the king's Horse Guards to an appointment as surgeon to the Household of James II compliments this 'great Son of Art' by stressing Thysick's growth and Poetry's decay'. 4 Quite
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