Syphilis and local contagious disorders / by Berkeley Hill.

Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Syphilis and local contagious disorders / by Berkeley Hill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    chain of evidence, Zeissl has lately endeavoured to supply.1 He adduces the cases of two women whose symptoms did not appear until after their conception of syphilitic children. In these cases, owing to the apprehensions of their husbands, who were being treated by him, Zeissl was able for a considerable time before the outbreak of syphilis in the wives to examine their genital organs almost daily (sic). He thus kept these ladies under close observation for two years ; during this time he failed to detect anything that could be construed to be an initial lesion. Yet the ladies both bore syphilitic children, and suffered themselves from general syphilis during their term of gestation. These cases, if we accept them, show that the production of an initial lesion, on the parts of the body which are within the range of vision, is not a necessitj7. Having set forth examples of the evidence which is accessible concerning the ways in which syphilis is described to reach the wife of a syphilitic man, it seems to us that the only proven mode of com- munication between adults is by ordinary contagion. At the same time, the evidence does not prove it to be impossible either that a woman may be infected by her husband without also developing the initial lesion, whether she conceive or not; or that she may be infected through the child. But it is, in our opinion, more in har- mony with known facts to believe that the mother, having received the virus into her system, transmits it to her offspring at some period of its intra-uterine life. Next, let us pass to a different part of the question of descent from the father. Here, though the father is syphilitic, and the child is infected, the mother is supposed to escape contagion. Alleged escape of the mother.—A syphilitic man marries, his wife apparently retains good health both during pregnancy and after the birth of one or more syphilitic children. In these cases, be it observed as most important, the mother neve]1 contracts syphilis from her offspring after its birth, though the child may produce the virus in a form so highly contagious to others, that the communication of syphilis to wet-nurses from foster-children is a notorious fact. The reality of the proposition that a man can procreate syphilitic children without also infecting his wife, is contested by most good authorities.2 These observers maintain that in all cases where the 1 H. Zeissl: Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift. 18S0, Janner 24. 2 Cullerier : De l’h4redite de la Syphilis. Mem. de la Soc. de Cliirurgie. 1854, p. 230. Notta: Archives Gdndrales de Mtkl. Mars, 1800. Charrier : Archives Gen. de Med. 1862, vol. ii., p. 324. (One of Charrier’s cases is curious. Both husband and wife suffered plainly from syphilis : infected children were born in 1855, 1856, and in 1858. The third child was born after seven months’ pregnancy, and had a syphilitic eruption about the anus.