Fracastoro, Girolamo
Girolamo Fracastoro (1478-1553), was an Italian physician born in Verona. He is credited with writing, in 1530, the first treatise on syphilis, in a three-volume poem, Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus (Syphilis or the French Disease).(a)*Around the same time, Fracastoro identified the then recently discovered Americas as Atlantis,
“connecting the origin of the New World people with Atlas and Atlantis.”(b) and furthermore in the first story he “illustrates the voyage of Cristoforo Colombo in the West Indies, where the disease (syphilis) was overwhelming among the natives because of a curse from the gods of the lost city of Atlantis.”(c)*
(a) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1657561/?page=4
(b) https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=79201