Household syphilis (syphilis oeconomica) : with observations on acquired syphilis in infants / by J.A. Nixon.

  • Nixon, John Alexander, 1874-1951.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Household syphilis (syphilis oeconomica) : with observations on acquired syphilis in infants / by J.A. Nixon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    disease was brought into the family by the eldest child, a girl aged 14 years, who contracted it in the ordinary way. She infected the vaccination wound of the youngest child in the family, a boy of two years, still nursing. This infant gave his mother a chancre of the nipple, and so in the course of a year the disease spread through the entire family, the father, strange to say, being the last to acquire it.” The chancre is always difficult to diagnose; experience teaches some of the peculiarities which it may present. First and fore- most it is not necessarily or even usually indurated if it occurs on the skin ; it will almost always be mistaken for a simple infection of some other sort. But it will prove very refractory to all treatment except mercury ; it will tend to remain localised and circumscribed, and this may be of assistance by contrast with suppurating foci in infants, which spread and multiply as a rule very readily. There may be, if on or near a mucous membrane, an extraordinary degree of localised swelling. A chancre of the lip, once seen, forms a clinical picture which on the next occasion will be recognised across the room. There is very little pus discharging from an angry raw surface. If the chancre be on the skin it has a characteristic raspberry appearance ; if near the nail it resembles a chronic whitlow; if on the face or scalp it may simulate impetigo, save that it is solitary, and, unlike impetigo, remains so ; if on the lip or tongue it has the angry tumidity of an insect sting; if on the tonsil, in my experience it has usually been mistaken for diphtheria, for over a greatly swollen tonsil, which looks as if it were bulging with pus, there spreads a queer glairy whitish yellow, sometimes cartilaginous-looking film, which is not removable like a true membrane, nor formed by a coalescence of plugged follicles. The tonsil may be incised for quinsy—I have seen it done—and the exudation promptly coats the sides of the incision. Speaking generally, in infants a chancre will probably at first, at any rate, be missed. The secondaries are often benign, far less severe than in heredo-syphilis : a faint roseola, a morbilliform eruption, or a moist wash-leather seborrhceic rash are the usual varieties met with; or it may look no more