Prostitution, in relation to public health : forming the introductory chapter to the second edition of the Treatise on syphilis / by William Acton ... Reprinted for private circulation.

  • William Acton
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Prostitution, in relation to public health : forming the introductory chapter to the second edition of the Treatise on syphilis / by William Acton ... Reprinted for private circulation. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PRESENT CONDITION OF VENEREAL DISEASES. had seen many get well in Numidia without either physic or physician, merely by the salubrity of the air.* In reading the books published on syphilis, which describe the frightful ravages the disease is said to have committed in the latter part of the fifteenth century, we must take into consideration many circum¬ stances. In the first place, it was supposed to be a new complaint, and as such, we are told, was abandoned by physicians, who acknowledge that they did not know how to cure it,f and its treatment was therefore left in the hands of quacks. All authors, particularly those non-me¬ dical men, (many of whom wrote on syphilis) are very apt to exaggerate a new disease, and we have every reason to believe that this was the result. The testimony of all writers on epidemics moreover shows that when a new form of disease invades a country, its virulence is wonder- lully increased ; and that on the contrary, when the complaint has become naturalized, its effects are of a much milder character. This seems to have been the case with syphilis, which forms no exception to the general rule. Has not this happened with smallpox in a former. Cholera in the present century ? before its coming, witness the alarm ; on its first outbreak, how great was the exaggeration, how little amen¬ able was it to treatment, and what numbers it carried off,—prevention is the weapon we now oppose to it. If the epidemic of the fiftt enth century be taken as the type, and a comparison made with the disease as we meet with it in the present day, then indeed the affection has become much milder. But this is not the proper view of the case ; syphilis, which I believe existed long antecedent to that period, became aggravated by the same causes exactly which are known, to increase its virulence in the year 1850. Send a body of men into a foreign country, as we did in the late Penin¬ sular war, expose them to vicissitudes of climate, and after long marches and short commons, let them indulge in wine and promiscuous intercourse, remain inattentive to cleanliness, and as surely as syphilis exists, so will it become aggravated, and assume a form as virulent as it did in 1493, and we shall again hear of the Black Lion of Portugal.£ * See the authors quoted by Dr. Weatherhead, page 72, et seq., in History of Venereal Diseases. f “ Literatos ab hac cura fugisse in hoc morbo se nihil scire confitendo.”—Jasper Torella. 1497. X A form of syphilis so called by the troops, because the virile member became in¬ flamed a lew hours after connexion, and then turning black, dropped off in the poultice, leaving a mere stump. Such cases are every now and then witnessed in our metropo-
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