Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The works of John Hunter. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![other diseases, and in that light it cannot be said to have any one sym- ptom peculiar to itself. For instance, every symptom of the venereal disease, in form of a gonorrhoea, may be produced by any other visible irritating cause, and often without any cause that can be assigned ; even buboes and swelled testicles, which are symptoms of this disease, have followed both stimulating injections and bougies when applied to the urethra of a sound person; and indeed these two symptoms, when they do arise from a venereal cause, in many cases are only symptomatic, not specific, but more especially the swelled testicle. Sores on the glans penis, prepuce, &c., in form of chancres, may, and do arise without any venereal infection, although we may observe that they are in general a consequence of former venereal sores which have been perfectly cured. The symptoms produced from the infection, when in the constitution, are such as are common to many other diseases, viz. blotches on the skin are common to what is called scorbutic habits; pains common to rheu- matism, swellings of the bones, periosteum, fasciae, &c. to many bad habits, perhaps of the scrofulous and rheumatic kind. Thus most of the symptoms of the venereal disease, in all its forms, are to be found in many other diseases; therefore we are led back to the original cause, to a number of leading circumstances, as dates, and its effects upon others from connexion when only local, joined with the present appear- ances and symptoms before we can determine absolutely what the dis- ease truly is; for all these taken together may be such as can attend no other disease. However, with all our knowledge, and with all the ap- plication of that knowledge to suspicious symptoms of this disease, we has been no obstacle to the beneficial effects of the remedy which will account for its failure. He will suspend it for a time, with the intention of resorting to it again at a subsequent period when he can employ it with greater precaution and under more favourable circumstances. If then the points of distinction on which reliance has been usually placed are decep- tive, it may be asked what other grounds of discrimination can be substituted. The answer is plain. Where there is a difference of virus, the difference of effects is not accidental or occasional, but constant and uniform. No doubt can arise as to the diver- sity of measles and smallpox, though these diseases were formerly confounded, because the distinction, when once pointed out, is confirmed by daily experience. The yaws of Africa and the West Indies, the sibbens of Scotland and Canada, the scherlievo of the Illyrian coast, the effects of the poison of glanders on the human subject, cannot be confounded with syphilis, because the symptoms are different; and this difference, which may be traced uniformly through a series of individuals affected by these maladies, pre- vents the possibility of attributing them to the same cause. The peculiarities which have been supposed to take the cases described as pseudo-syphilitic out of the class of syphilitic diseases are uncertain and variable, and can never constitute the distinctive characters of a separate and independent malady.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21996635_0002_0489.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
