The Third Great Plague: A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People

he History of SyphilisSyphilis has a remarkable history,[1] about which it is worth while to say afew 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 lep-rosy. Our growing knowledge of medical history, however, and the findingof new records of the disease, have shown this view to be in all probabilitya mistake. Syphilis was unknown in Europe until the return of Columbusand his sailors from America, and its progress over the civilized world can betraced step by step, or better, in leaps and bounds, from that date. It camefrom the island of Haiti, in which it was prevalent at the time the discover-ers of America landed there, and the return of Columbus's infected sailors toEurope was the signal for a blasting epidemic, which in the sixteenth and sev-enteenth centuries devastated Spain, Italy, France, and England, and spreadinto India, Asia, China, and Japan.[1] For a detailed account in English, see Pusey, W. A.: "Syphilis as a ModernProblem," Amer. Med. Assoc., 1915.It is a well-recognized fact that a disease which has never appeared among3 JOHN H. (JOHN HINCHMAN) STOKESa people before, when it does attack them, spreads with terrifying rapidityand pursues a violent and destructive course on the new soil which they of-fer. This was the course of syphilis in Europe in the years immediately fol-lowing the return of Columbus in 1493. Invading armies, always a fruitfulmeans of spreading disease, carried syphilis with them everywhere and leftit to rage unchecked among the natives when the armies themselves wentdown to destruction or defeat. Explorers and voyagers carried it with theminto every corner of the earth, so that it is safe to say that in this year of grace1917 there probably does not exist a single race or people upon whom syphilishas not set its mark. The disease, in four centuries, coming seemingly out ofnowhere, has become inseparably woven into the problems of civilization,and is part and parcel of the concerns of every human being. The helplessfear caused by the violence of the disease in its earlier days, when the sud-denness of its attack on an unprepared people paralyzed comprehension,has given place to knowledge such as we can scarcely duplicate for any of theother scourges of humanity. The disease has in its turn become more subtleand deceiving, its course is seldom marked by the bold and glaring destruc-tiveness, the melting away of resistance, so familiar in its early history. Themasses of sores, the literal falling to pieces of skeletons, are replaced by theinconspicuous but no less real deaths from heart and brain and other in-ternal diseases, the losses to sight and hearing, the crippling and death ofchildren, and all the insidious, quiet deterioration and degeneration of ourfiber which syphilis brings about. From devouring a man alive on