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was a shepherd, and in Latin the word for shepherd is pastor.
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The man who was punished was a pastor, not a priest;
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that is, possibly a Protestant leader.
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So, there's a sly hint here that syphilis,
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the disease, is a divine punishment for the reformation.
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So, Fracastoro didn't adhere to the Americanist position.
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Then there's perhaps a third more modern idea, or hypothesis,
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is that perhaps the causative agent of syphilis emerged
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in a Darwinian manner;
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the spirochete or treponema pallidum,
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arose perhaps as a mutation of some pre-existing treponemes
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that are morphologically very similar under the microscope,