The Third Great Plague | Page 3

spread into
India, Asia, China, and Japan.
[1] For a detailed account in English, see Pusey, W. A.: "Syphilis as a
Modern Problem," Amer. Med. Assoc., 1915.
It is a well-recognized fact that a disease which has never appeared
among a people before, when it does attack them, spreads with
terrifying rapidity and pursues a violent and destructive course on the
new soil which they offer. This was the course of syphilis in Europe in
the years immediately following the return of Columbus in 1493.
Invading armies, always a fruitful means of spreading disease, carried
syphilis with them everywhere and left it to rage unchecked among the
natives when the armies themselves went down to destruction or defeat.
Explorers and voyagers carried it with them into every corner of the
earth, so that it is safe to say that in this year of grace 1917 there
probably does not exist a single race or people upon whom syphilis has
not set its mark. The disease, in four centuries, coming seemingly out
of nowhere, has become inseparably woven into the problems of
civilization, and is part and parcel of the concerns of every human
being. The helpless fear caused by the violence of the disease in its
earlier days, when the suddenness of its attack on an unprepared people
paralyzed comprehension, has given place to knowledge such as we can
scarcely duplicate for any of the other scourges of humanity. The
disease has in its turn become more subtle and deceiving, its course is
seldom marked by the bold and glaring destructiveness, the melting
away of resistance, so familiar in its early history. The masses of sores,
the literal falling to pieces of skeletons, are replaced by the
inconspicuous but no less real deaths from heart and brain and other
internal diseases, the losses to sight and hearing, the crippling and

death of children, and all the insidious, quiet deterioration and
degeneration of our fiber which syphilis brings about. From devouring
a man alive on the street, syphilis has taken to knifing him quietly in
his bed.
Although syphilis sprang upon the world from ambush, so to speak, it
did the world one great service--it aroused Medicine from the sleep of
the Middle Ages. Many of the greatest names in the history of the art
are inseparably associated with the progress of our knowledge of this
disease. As Pusey points out, it required the force of something wholly
unprecedented to take men away from tradition and the old stock in
trade of ideas and formulas, and to make them grasp new things.
Syphilis was the new thing of the time in the sixteenth century and the
study which it received went far toward putting us today in a position
to control it. Before the beginning of the twentieth century almost all
that ordinary observation of the diseased person could teach us was
known of syphilis. It needed only laboratory study, such as has been
given it during the past fifteen years, to put us where we could appeal
to every intelligent man and woman to enlist in a brilliantly promising
campaign. For a time syphilis was confused with gonorrhea, and there
could be no better proof of the need for separating the two in our minds
today than to study the way in which this confusion set back progress
in our knowledge of syphilis. John Hunter, who fathered the idea of the
identity of the two diseases, sacrificed his life to his idea indirectly.
Ricord, a Frenchman, whose name deserves to be immortal, set
Hunter's error right, and as the father of modern knowledge of syphilis,
prepared us for the revolutionary advances of the last ten years.
There is something awe-inspiring in the quiet way in which one great
victory has succeeded another in the battle against syphilis in the last
decade. If we are out of the current of these things, in the office or the
store, or in the field of industry and business, announcements from the
great laboratories of the world seldom reach us, and when they do, they
have an impractical sound, an unreality for us. So one hears, as if in a
speaking-tube from a long distance, the words that Schaudinn and
Hoffmann, on April 19, 1905, discovered the germ that causes syphilis,
not realizing that the fact contained in those few brief words can alter

the undercurrent of human history, and may, within the lives of our
children and our children's children, remake the destiny of man on the
earth. A great spirit lives in the work of men like Metchnikoff and
Roux and Maisonneuve, who made possible the prophylaxis of syphilis,
in that of Bordet and Wassermann, who devised the remarkable blood
test for the disease, and in that of Ehrlich and Hata, who built up