Syphilis first manifests itself by a local sore at the point of contact of the poison conveying the disease. This sore may be so small as to escape notice, or it may be considered of no importance, for, as we shall soon see, it is by no means limited to the sexual, organs. After a time, which is extremely variable extending from ten days to even six months, this first sore will be followed by other symptoms of a superficial character. Eruptions on the skin and on the lining membrane of the mouth will be noticed, the glands may enlarge, the hair may fall off, perhaps the throat will be sore; and from this beginning the disease will go deeper and deeper into the body unless arrested by treatment.
Any discharge from a syphilitic patient is capable of communicating his disease, if it be active at the time in the patient. There are periods of seeming quiescence during which the poison of syphilis is apparently dormant in the system, and at such times contact with the patient may not result in the communication of the disease; but except at such times the plague passes from one person to another with fearful facility. A pipe or drinking-cup used by a patient may communicate his malady, a kiss may easily convey the poison and the kissing of infants born of syphilitic parents has done much to spread the disease. Of course the principal mode of contagion is in sexual intercourse, and thus many an innocent wife has acquired this loathsome and deadly plague from a vicious husband. No matter what the stage of the disease, it can be communicated in these ways, and it always begins with the local sore at the point of contact.
It will be seen from the above, that a person afflicted with this disease, cannot be too careful to avoid every possible form of contact with his fellows, and of course no such person, if single, has a right to think of marriage until he is not merely pronounced to be cured, but until he has passed a full year after his cure is pronounced without the smallest sign of relapse. One cannot be too careful on this point for, as remarked above, long periods are often passed without a sign of the disease, which will then break out in full vigor and proceed with its work of spreading a living death through the system. Syphilis is probably a curable disease but its consequences are so dreadful that no man who has the slightest self-respect will run any risk of contaminating the blood of an innocent wife and of causing her to endure the pains of child-birth only to bury only to bury her infant within a few months or years. The only way of avoiding such risks is by submitting the case to professional treatment, and when it is cured by still waiting long enough to leave no doubt that the cure is permanent before venturing to enter the bonds of matrimony.
With regard to the other impediments to marriage on the part of the man-impotency and sterility–they are not conditions that an unprofessional person could recognize, and therefore, no man should give himself any concern about them till he has secured the opinion of a physician regarding them; but of course no man who has any reason to suspect the existence of such impediments should contract a marriage without consulting a medical man. Impotency signifies a permanent condition of inability to effect sexual connection, such as might result from an entire destruction of the penis and such as does occasionally result from nervous causes brought on by long-continued misuse of the sexual organs or by disease. Sterility signifies a condition in which the fecundating germs are absent from the seminal fluid, thus preventing a man from becoming a father, although he may be able to have connection and to discharge a fluid which can only be known to be sterile after a careful microscopic examination. There are temporary conditions which are perfectly curable which simulate impotency, and these are magnified by quacks into an importance which does not belong to them, in order to frighten the ignorant out of money for worse than useless treatment. The important relations and the delicate character of the sexual organs make it necessary to put the treatment of their diseased conditions into the hands of the physician, but the advertising specialist and his false and over-drawn printed statements and insinuations should be shunned, and the honest, settled, regular practitioner should be frankly consulted and his advice confidently followed.
Member New York State and County Homoeopathic Medical Societies ;
Formerly Staff-Physician to the College and Wilson Mission
Dispensaries ; Fellow of the N. Y. Academy of Anthropology ; Member American Historical Association,