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.

    60/118 (page 50)
    syphilis, with a course and character similar to that in women; but strong, healthy men in the prime of life are the greatest sufferers. General paralysis mostly affects vigorous, ener- getic men who have done well in the world, and whose heredity is free from the taint of insanity, but who have acquired syphilis. They begin with an outburst of extravagance and speculation that often half ruins their families, then fits set in, and each fit leaves them in a more demented condition than before, until finally they become bed-ridden in a deplorable state, without any control of their urine and their faeces. In our asylums the saddest and most distressing examples of human wreckage —men, women, and children—are to be seen in the wards for epileptics and general paralytics. Some- times general paralysis begins with an attack of acute mania with grandiose delusions, sometimes with the fits of a varied character, and in some cases it is the culmination and termination of locomotor ataxia. I once had to take charge of a magistrate from Barbados to Plymouth, who came on board in apparently good health and with a powerful phy- sique. He suddenly developed an attack of acute insanity of a violent and resistive character, and