The first Ladies’ Handbook post is here. This instalment, “Syphilis” and “Personal Responsibility”, completes Chapter III: “Outside The Marriage Circle”. [Bold is mine.]
I don’t really expect everyone to be as interested in old medical descriptions as I am, but I find them utterly compelling. For reasons you can gather from the description below, syphilis is known in medical circles as “The Great Imitator”. This is why House M.D.’s minions frequently raise it as a possible diagnosis in their medical mystery cases, along with lupus, another great mimic.
The spirochaete that causes syphilis is now called Treponema pallidum. However, the natural history of the disease in an individual had been known for a long time. (And yet, white Americans still performed the cruel, racist Tuskegee study.) There was quite a period of confusion, however, in which it was thought that syphilis and gonorrhoea were the same disease. This confusion was caused by an experiment gone wrong. John Hunter, an 18th-century pathologist, in the true spirit of pioneering investigators everywhere, infected himself deliberately with gonorrhoea, using the pus from an infected patient. Unbeknownst to him, the patient was also infected with syphilis, and Hunter contracted both diseases. His well-publicised conclusion that the two diseases were the same set back STD knowledge for fifty years.
The first well-documented syphilis epidemic was in Europe in the 1400s, but the origin of the spirochaete is disputed. Some believe it originated in Europe or Africa, as early as Hippocratic times; other believe it originated in the new world, and was brought back by sailors around the time of Columbus.
