[3] Syphilis is, again, the most serious single cause of the
most severe forms of brain disease and insanity, this often coming on
many years after the infection, and when the early symptoms were but
slight. Blindness and deafness from the beginning of life are in a large
proportion of cases due to syphilis. There is, indeed, no organ of the
body which is not liable to break down, often with fatal results,
through syphilis, so that it has been well said that a doctor who knows
syphilis thoroughly is familiar with every branch of his profession.
Gonorrhoea is a still commoner disease than syphilis; how common it is
very difficult to say. It is also an older disease, for the ancient
Egyptians knew it, and the Biblical King Esarhaddon of Assyria, as the
records of his court show, once caught it. It seems to some people no
more serious than a common cold, yet it is able to inflict much
prolonged misery on its victims, while on the race its influence in the
long run is even more deadly than that of syphilis, for gonorrhoea is
the chief cause of sterility in women, that is to say, in from 30 to 50
per cent. of such cases, while of cases of sterility in men (which form
a quarter to a third of the whole) gonorrhoea is the cause in from 70 to
90 per cent. The inflammation of the eyes of the new-born leading to
blindness is also in 70 per cent. cases due to gonorrhoea in the mother,
and this occurs in over six per 1,000 births.
Three years ago a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate the best
methods of controlling venereal disease, as small-pox, typhus, and to a
large extent typhoid, have already been controlled.
Pages:
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134