As far as I recall, syphilis was brought over as part of the Columbian Exchange. What was the reaction to it in Europe?
I'll answer for Spain: yes. In terms of historical sources, Spanish hospitals serving syphilitic patients often forced patients to queue outside the doors, making their identities publicly known. Women often wore veils in an attempt to maintain their privacy and prevent their condition from becoming publicly known. They also often wore elaborate, elegant clothing to cloak themselves in respectability and avoid the association between syphilis and prostitution.
Culturally and in literature, syphilis was associated with prostitutes, who were portrayed as diseased women who spread contagion due to their amorality. Francisco Delicado, who himself suffered from syphilis, wrote La Lozana, an early picaresque novel that basically explored his coming to terms with his own condition through the lens of a Jewish, noseless, syphilitic prostitute who is ironically also a folk healer, advising her patients about gynecological health and hygiene. Syphilis was primarily viewed as being spread by women and was sometimes part of a Virgin Mary/Eve dynamic, in which anxieties about female purity became blended with anxieties about syphilitic contagion. In La Lozana and to a lesser extent its predecessor La Celestina, prostitutes are portrayed as dangerous, for spreading disease to their clients, as well as encouraging young men and women to engage in sexual activities, and for ironically attempting to "heal" people, often other women who struggle with painful sex, infertility, or who want to fake their virginity before their wedding night. Jean Dangler convincingly argues that anxiety about female healers was also related to the professionalization of medicine. Because women were forbidden from studying medicine, male physicians sought to discredit women folk healers, who were sometimes prostitutes. This happened to coincide with the rise of syphilis.
Sources: Dangler, Jean. Mediating Fictions: Literature, Women Healers, and the Go-Between in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia.
Berco, Cristian. "Textiles as social texts: syphilis, material culture and gender in golden age Spain." Journal of Social History, 2011.