The etiology of syphilis / by Simon Flexner.

  • Simon Flexner
Date:
[1905?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The etiology of syphilis / by Simon Flexner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    attenuated the virus by its passage through the lower monkeys so as to produce a vaccine which, when used to infect the chimpanzee, provoked a local process, and left this animal protected from the virulent human virus. Neisser, on the con- trary, has inoculated successfully not only from monkey to monkey, producing the local lesions, but from monkey to anthropoid, with the pro- duction both of the local primary and the sys- temic secondary infection. Hence he concluded that Metschnikoff’s failure was due not to pro- tection, but to syphilization of the chimpanzee. Doubtless the higher apes will come in time to resolve many disputed points in human syphilis, and to supply facts where we now have opinion and conjecture. The use of these animals has already answered partially certain questions re- lating to the manner of entrance of the virus into the body and the comparative virulence of dif- ferent products of the syphilized animal; and it may also help to explain better than we now know it the important questions of re-infection in syphilis. Cutaneous inoculations with primary syphilides and primary lymphatic glands cause lesions ; subcutaneous injections of chancres and condylomata produce no specific manifestations ; insertion of infected lymph glands directly in the peritoneal cavity is without effect. Defibrinated blood and blood serum from cases of recent syphilis in man are innocuous when injected sub- cutaneously and intraperitoneally. Blood serum from syphilitics is also without protective ac- tion against subsequent inoculation with active virus. The internal organs—spleen, liver, bone- marrow—of the recently infected monkey and ape possess neither infective nor protective proper- ties of high degree. Perhaps they are wholly innocuous. These are some of Neisser’s results, which, if not conclusive, have yet a bearing upon the relative infectiousness of the blood and in- ternal organs of syphilitics, and bear on the questions of the avenue through which the virus
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