Albert Reibmayr remarks that “during the last 400 years, every human being now living in Europe has had about 4,000 ancestors; of these, however disagreeable the fact may seem, a considerable number must have had to contend with syphilis.”[345]
But this undoubted fact, that all of us have been to a certain extent “syphilized,”[346] plays its part to our advantage in the campaign against syphilis—that campaign which our own time has taken up with joyful hope of success.
Above all, let honour be paid to the ever youthful and fresh master and Nestor of European research into the subject of syphilis, Alfred Fournier, the evening of whose life is devoted to the campaign against syphilis as a “social danger.” To the great scientific works of his life he has now added the small, but not less valuable, explanatory writings, which are being sold at a low price all over France, and in part also have already been translated into German and English.[347] Their aim is to get the people on our side in the campaign against syphilis.
When, in April, 1906, I paid the master a visit, he gave me the last of these popular campaign writings. Its title was in the form of a question:
“En Guérit-on?” (“Is it Curable?”).
And the answer given on p. 4 runs: “Yes, it is curable, for of all diseases syphilis is the one which can best, most easily, and most certainly be cured.” And why? Because we have a wonderful specific against this disease, which, when given at the proper time and in the proper manner, works a miracle. This remedy is
Mercury.
I put this name clearly and visibly before the eyes of the reader, a name which for every physician to whose lot it falls to treat cases of syphilis has a truly miraculous sound, a name against which the unconscientious ignoramuses, the evil-disposed enemies of the human race have spoken their anathema, one which a great thinker and honourable man like Schopenhauer regarded as a “triumph of medicine,” a fact which he experienced personally in his own body. All honourable, critical, and scientific physicians agree in this opinion. In my work on “The Origin of Syphilis,” vol. i., p. 127, I have expressed the matter in the following words:
“Mercury is and remains—notwithstanding the ignorant and ill-considered hostility of quacks and their kindred—the divine means for the treatment of syphilis; mercury is to syphilis what water is to fire, in the hands of that physician who knows how to use the drug rightly, how to apply it at the right time and in the right form, who watches closely the course of the disease in his patient, and who supports the mercury cure (always of primary importance) by other therapeutic measures as indicated.”
Only the physician, the scientifically trained medical man, can cure syphilis; the quack certainly cannot; in his hands mercury is truly enough a dangerous “poison.” But he has no right to say, and he speaks deliberate untruths when he says, that we physicians “poison” the “unfortunate” syphilitics with mercury. To such preposterous accusations we can give a brief and incisive answer.