Syphilis
Syphilis is one of the oldest diseases in human history. Its ravages and destruction of health and life thruout many centuries up to our days have been such that it has been called a “black plague,” in distinction from the great “white plague,” tuberculosis. It is hard to say which one of the scourges of humanity is superior in its destruction and wrecking of humanity. While tuberculosis apparently carries away more lives in their prime and selects victims principally among the young at the very height of individual happiness and social usefulness, Syphilis surpasses its terrible rival in its universal character of distribution, in the easier mode of infection, and more lasting presence of the poison in the human body. No country or climate is free from the scourge of Syphilis. No age, no station of life gives protection from its infection. Syphilis claims its millions of victims in all parts of the universe. It has populated cemeteries with untold numbers of bodies of still-born babies and infants who died in the early months of life; it has filled the insane asylums of the world with thousands of hopelessly insane men and women; it has crowded the institutions for the incurable and defective with paralytic adults and children crippled mentally and physically from birth.
The individual suffers as much from the ravages of Syphilis as society. Lucky is the man who can say that he is perfectly cured from Syphilis after two or three years of the most thorough treatment. Lucky is the man if he can be sure that later in life, after he may have forgotten all about his primary infection, the dormant germs of Syphilis lurking in the deep recesses of his body will not attack his most vital organs, as arteries, heart, or brain, and will not strike him down to permanent invalidism or slow but hopeless agony of an incurable disease.
Great as the latest medical discoveries in the recognition and treatment are, the course of the disease is so insidious and treacherous, and the treatment requires such persistence and patience and such expenditure of time and money, that probably no more than half of the syphilitic patients carry out to the end the treatment and period of medical observation, and thousands and thousands of them are sure to be stricken down later in life with the above mentioned terrible after-complications of Syphilis, and are doomed to premature invalidism, paralytic diseases, and insanity.