Only the human kind suffer syphilis and from time immemorial. The wages of sex sin is syphilis.
Syphilis may be acquired by infection or by inheritance. The infection, as a rule, is acquired by sexual intercourse, occasionally by contact of an abraded spot on the skin with some article soiled with the syphilitic virus. Once acquired it may become an heirloom handed down to the third and fourth generation, beyond which there may be no offspring.
The infection is made manifest first in a primary skin lesion, a single chancre, which, as a rule, has all the physical appearance of and stages of development of a single small pox eruption, or a typical vaccination sore produced by a pure cow pox vaccination, only larger. For this reason syphilis is sometimes called pock or big pock.
In the second stage, if the chancre ulcer should be healed, a rash-like eruption appears on the skin, mucous patches form in the mouth and throat and the hair falls out. If the chancre ulcer is not restored to its place by the appropriate homoeopathic remedy the third stage appears with general poor health, anaemia, malnutrition, bone diseases, gummata, soft tumor like growths, in the deeper tissues. These tumors affecting the nervous system cause locomotor ataxia, paresis, mental defect, dependency.
Syphilitics may become absolutely morally irresponsible, economically incompetent.
Congenital or hereditary syphilis is sometimes called the fourth stage. It is characterized by skin rashes, snuffles, wasting of tissues, eye diseases, malformation of teeth and bones, etc. Should the syphilis affect the nervous system, congenital idiocy, or mental defectives, delinquents, unmoral, unsocial, criminal personalities may result. Moral irresponsibility may become a fixed state in the congenital syphilitic.
The recognized treatment for syphilis has been suppressive since 800 B.C. The more modern therapeutic assaults on syphilis devotes its efforts to attempts to destroy the syphilitic spirilla in the blood stream after it has first closed the chancre ulcer that nature made gateway of exit and not the means of entrance, which was an abrasion. The homoeopathic treatment detailed in the organon is eliminative. Here too the challenge is made, “Test the methods and publish the failures.”
The genius of syphilis is to dissolve tissue. It creates the oxygenoid constitution. By virtue of this trait of over oxidation it becomes the substratum in which all wasting diseases are planted. Of these tuberculosis is typical.
