Sexual disease and its medical prevention / by H.N. Robson.

  • Robson, H. N.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sexual disease and its medical prevention / by H.N. Robson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    25/118 (page 15)
    I disease throughout al Italie of an unknown nature which sundrie nations have called by sundrie names.” For generations this disease, called syphilis, or the pox, has been one of the degener- ating scourges of the human races ; and I have never found a country yet that was free from it, although I have been in sixty-two different countries and islands {vide Appendix A). For years doctors and pathologists have known that it must be due to a micro-organism, but in spite of the most learned researches were unable to find it under the microscope, owing to the fact that no suitable staining method was forthcoming; however, at last, in 1905 it was revealed by Giemsa’s stain to Schaudinn and Hoffman, and called the Spirochaeta pallida, or the Treponema pallidum. The spirochaete, as it will be termed in this book for short, is a delicate - looking, moving, thread-like micro-organism, of spiral form with extreme tenuity, tapering at both ends, and possessed of remarkable longevity in the tissues, and capable of great resisting power to the cells and fluids of the human body. Metchnikoff has made the most elaborate experiments with this microbe on the higher forms of apes, notably the chimpanzees, because the lower forms of monkeys