The Third Great Plague: A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday PeopleStokes, John H. (John Hinchman)
History
The Third Great Plague: A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People
Stokes, John H. (John Hinchman)
Syphilis
The aim in syphilis, then, is to crush the disease at its outset by a
vigorous campaign. Not until an amount of treatment which experience
has shown to be an average requirement has been given, is it safe to
draw breath and wait to see what the effect on the enemy has been.
Dilatory tactics and compromises are often more dangerous than giving a
little more than the least amount of treatment possible, for good
measure. This is, of course, always provided the behavior of the body
under the ordeal of treatment is closely studied and observed by an
expert and that it is not blindly pushed to the point where injury is
done by the medicine rather than the disease.
+The Importance of Salvarsan.+--Salvarsan is an absolute essential in
the treatment of those early infections in which an abortive cure can be
hoped for, and in them it must be begun without a day's delay. To some
extent, the abortive cure of the disease, with its 100 per cent
certainty, will therefore remain a luxury until the public is aroused to
the necessity of providing it under safe conditions and without
restrictions for all who need it. At all stages of the disease after the
earliest it is an aid, and a powerful one, but it cannot do the work
alone, as mercury usually can. But though mercury is efficient, it is
slow, and the greater rapidity of action of salvarsan and its power to
control infectious lesions give it a unique place. The combination of
the two is powerful enough to fully justify the statement that none of
the great scourges of the human race offers its victim a better prospect
of recovery than does syphilis.
Is a cure worth while? There is only one thing that is more so, and
that is never to have had syphilis at all. The uncured syphilitic has a
sword hanging over his head. At any day or hour the disease which he
scorned or ignored may crush him, or what is worse, may crush what is
nearest and dearest to him in the world. It does it with a certainty
which not even the physician who sees syphilis all the time as his
life-work can get callous to. It is gambling with the cards stacked
against one to let a syphilitic infection go untreated, or treated short
of cure. It is criminal to force on others the risks to which an
untreated syphilitic subjects those in intimate contact with him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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