Produced by Audrey Longhurst, LN Yaddanapudi and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images from the Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History, Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University) The Third Great Plague A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People By John H. Stokes, A.B., M.D. Chief of the Section of Dermatology and Syphilology The Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota Assistant Professor of Medicine The Mayo Foundation Graduate School of the University of Minnesota Philadelphia and London W. B. Saunders Company 1920 Published, November, 1917 Copyright, 1917, by W. B. Saunders Company Reprinted July, 1918 Reprinted February, 1920 PRINTED IN AMERICA PREFACE The struggle of man against his unseen and silent enemies, the lower or bacterial forms of life, once one becomes alive to it, has an irresistible fascination. More dramatic than any novel, more sombre and terrifying than a battle fought in the dark, would be the intimate picture of the battle of our bodies against the hosts of disease. If we could see with the eye of the microscope and feel and hear with the delicacy of chemical and physical interactions between atoms, the heat and intensity and the savage relentlessness of that battle would blot out all perception of anything but itself. Just as there are sounds we cannot hear, and light we cannot see, so there is a world of small things, living in us and around us, which sways our destiny and carries astray the best laid schemes of our wills and personalities. The gradual development of an awareness, a realization of the power of this world of minute things, has been the index of progress in the bodily well-being of the human race through the centuries marking the rebirth of medicine after the sleep of the Dark Ages. In these days of sanitary measures and successful public health activity, it is becoming more and more difficult for us to realize the terrors of the Black Plagues, the devastation, greater and more frightful than war, which centuries ago swept over Europe and Asia time and again, scarcely leaving enough of the living to bury the dead. Cholera, smallpox, bubonic plague, with terrifying suddenness fell upon a world of ignorance, and each in turn humbled humanity to the dust before its invisible enemies. Even within our own recollection, the germ of influenza, gaining a foothold inside our defenses, took the world by storm, and beginning probably at Hongkong, within the years 1889-90, swept the entire habitable earth, affecting hundreds of thousands of human beings, and leaving a long train of debilitating and even crippling complications.