The Third Great Plague | Page 2

The third great
plague is syphilis, a disease which, in these times of public
enlightenment, is still shrouded in obscurity, entrenched behind a
barrier of silence, and armed, by our own ignorance and false shame,
with a thousand times its actual power to destroy. Against all of these
three great plagues medicine has pitted the choicest personalities, the
highest attainments, and the uttermost resources of human knowledge.
Against all of them it has made headway. It is one of the ironies, the
paradoxes, of fate that the disease against which the most tremendous
advances have been made, the most brilliant victories won, is the third
great plague, syphilis--the disease that still destroys us through our
ignorance or our refusal to know the truth.
We have crippled the power of tuberculosis through
knowledge,--wide-spread, universal knowledge,--rather than through
any miraculous discoveries other than that of the cause and the
possibility of cure. We shall in time obliterate cancer by the same
means. Make a disease a household word, and its power is gone. We
are still far from that day with syphilis. The third great plague is just
dawning upon us--a disease which in four centuries has already cost a
whole inferno of human misery and a heaven of human happiness.
When we awake, we shall in our turn destroy the destroyer--and the
more swiftly because of the power now in the hands of medicine to blot
out the disease. To the day of that awakening books like this are
dedicated. The facts here presented are the common property of the
medical profession, and it is impossible to claim originality for their
substance. Almost every sentence is written under the shadow of some
advance in knowledge which cost a life-time of some man's labor and
self-sacrifice. The story of the conquest of syphilis is a fabric of great

names, great thoughts, dazzling visions, epochal achievements. It is
romance triumphant, not the tissue of loathsomeness that common
misconception makes it.
The purpose of this book is accordingly to put the accepted facts in
such a form that they will the more readily become matters of common
knowledge. By an appeal to those who can read the newspapers
intelligently and remember a little of their high-school physiology, an
immense body of interested citizens can be added to the forces of a
modern campaign against the third great plague. For such an awakening
of public opinion and such a movement for wider coöperation, the
times are ready.
JOHN H. STOKES.
ROCHESTER, MINN.

CONTENTS
PAGE

CHAPTER I
THE HISTORY OF SYPHILIS 11

CHAPTER II
SYPHILIS AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM 15

CHAPTER III

THE NATURE AND COURSE OF SYPHILIS 21 The Prevalence of
Syphilis 24 The Primary Stage 26

CHAPTER IV
THE NATURE AND COURSE OF SYPHILIS (Continued) 35 The
Secondary Stage 35

CHAPTER V
THE NATURE AND COURSE OF SYPHILIS (Continued) 45 Late
Syphilis (Tertiary Stage) 45

CHAPTER VI
THE BLOOD TEST FOR SYPHILIS 54

CHAPTER VII
THE TREATMENT OF SYPHILIS 60 General Considerations 60
Mercury 62

CHAPTER VIII
THE TREATMENT OF SYPHILIS (Continued) 70 Salvarsan 70

CHAPTER IX
THE CURE OF SYPHILIS 80

CHAPTER X
HEREDITARY SYPHILIS 92

CHAPTER XI
THE TRANSMISSION AND HYGIENE OF SYPHILIS 109

CHAPTER XII
THE TRANSMISSION AND HYGIENE OF SYPHILIS (Continued)
121 The Control of Infectiousness in Syphilis 121 Syphilis and
Marriage 125

CHAPTER XIII
THE TRANSMISSION AND HYGIENE OF SYPHILIS (Continued)
133 Syphilis and Prostitution 133 Personal Hygiene of Syphilis 136

CHAPTER XIV
MENTAL ATTITUDES IN THEIR RELATION TO SYPHILIS 141

CHAPTER XV
MORAL AND PERSONAL PROPHYLAXIS 156

CHAPTER XVI
PUBLIC EFFORT AGAINST SYPHILIS 164
INDEX 187

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE PAUL EHRLICH [1854-1915] 69
FRITZ SCHAUDINN [1871-1906] 112
E. ROUX 161
ÉLIE METCHNIKOFF [1845-1916] 161

The Third Great Plague

Chapter I
The History of Syphilis
Syphilis has a remarkable history,[1] about which it is worth while to
say a few words. Many people think of the disease as at least as old as
the Bible, and as having been one of the conditions included under the
old idea of leprosy. Our growing knowledge of medical history,
however, and the finding of new records of the disease, have shown

this view to be in all probability a mistake. Syphilis was unknown in
Europe until the return of Columbus and his sailors from America, and
its progress over the civilized world can be traced step by step, or better,
in leaps and bounds, from that date. It came from the island of Haiti, in
which it was prevalent at the time the discoverers of America landed
there, and the return of Columbus's infected sailors to Europe was the
signal for a blasting epidemic, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries devastated Spain, Italy, France, and England, and