Scourges of to-day (venereal disease, cancer, tuberculosis, alcoholism) / by E.T. Burke.

  • Burke, E. T. (Edmund Tytler), 1888-1941.
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Scourges of to-day (venereal disease, cancer, tuberculosis, alcoholism) / by E.T. Burke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    28/188 page 10
    in a great city will exclaim : “I cannot possibly accept such a figure. I examine many thou¬ sands of patients a year, and I only see two or three cases of syphilis annually.” What such a man really means is that he diagnoses only two or three cases of syphilis in twelve months. He sees very many more, but he does not always recognize the disease when he sees it. He may deal with a hundred cases of diabetes, but while they all have sugar present in the urine, he may miss the fact that in ten of them the presence of sugar is due to a syphilitic inflam¬ mation of the pancreas. But he has never been taught to think of syphilis; he has merely been concerned with the symptoms of sugar in the urine—he labels the case “ diabetes ”, treats the symptoms with insulin, and does not consider what the cause may be. He sees many cases of stomach trouble; but it does not enter his mind that a certain number of them may be the gastric crises of locomotor ataxia—which is syphilitic. Because the patient with organic disease of the heart is a man of eminent respectability, syphilis is not to be thought of. Until the ubiquity of syphilis is thoroughly realized, until in every patient the possibility of this disease is thought of and eliminated, many thousands of cases will go unrecognized and untreated, and syphilis io
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3