What conditions influence the course of infantile syphilis? / by James Nevins Hyde.

  • James Nevins Hyde
Date:
[1897?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: What conditions influence the course of infantile syphilis? / by James Nevins Hyde. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of virus versus individual, with the weight of evi¬ dence now on one side and now on the other, ac¬ cording to the conditions presented in different cases. These conditions are wholly different in the case of chemic intoxication, and in the instance of poisoning by living micro-organisms. In the former the pathologic results are proportioned with approxi¬ mate exactness to the dosage of the chemic poison. In the latter, the multiplication of fission-fungi within the animal organism may proceed with the greatest activity after a minimum quantity of the virus has once been introduced into the economy; and the soil, together with favorable or inhospitable environment, has much to do with the question of multiplication and toxin production of the implanted germs. If we turn to the facts of general pathology we find the answer which awaits us there the same as in syphi¬ lis—a malady which Andral once declared would furn¬ ish a key to the study of all morbid phenomena in the human body. The smallest dosage of the variolous poison, even in the attenuated form of mild vario¬ loid, is capable of transmitting to the unprotected the severest confluent form of the disease. In cer¬ tain epidemics of hemorrhagic variola even the pro¬ tected at times may suffer. By the attenuation of a virus many of the brilliant advances of modern thera¬ peutics have been attained. Diphtheria, hydrophobia, and tetanus bear ample,witness of this fact. But he is indeed blind who cannot see in the subject of tubercu¬ losis, of septicemia, of yellow fever, and of cholera the wall which is ever and again built as a bulwark
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