A treatise on syphilis in new-born children and infants at the breast / by P. Diday ; translated by G. Whitley.

  • Diday, P. (Paul), 1812-1894.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on syphilis in new-born children and infants at the breast / by P. Diday ; translated by G. Whitley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    child has been infected by actual contact (siibagitatus a tnrpissimo in moribus homine). II. That in which it has been suckled by an infected nurse. III. That in which^ being itself infected^ it com- municates the disease to its nurse. We see that tliis description includes everytliing except the most usual mode of communicatioic that by generation. Another writer of this period seems to have been on the right track. Augier Terrier (1553) thus expresses himself: ^^Cum in utero morbus contrahitur^ tancjuam hereditarium fit malum, et tanquam corruptiim elementum una cum paterno vel materno semine infunditur; aut si mater a die conceptionis in morbum inciderit, communicatio foetui, vitiosis infectisque humoribus.^^ The three modes in which infection may occur during intra-uterine life are here very clearly defined, and modern researches have added nothing to this distinction. Unfortunately, in establishing it. Terrier appears to have trusted more to its probability than to its reality; for he does not allude to any observation of his own in support of it. An almost equally positive assertion is met with in the work of one of his contemporaries. The following apparently decisive pas- sage may be quoted from P. Hascharidus (1554): ^^Trans- mittitur per generationem, quoniam hie morbus humores vitiat et corrumpit; unde semen corruptem qui sic affecti sunt emittunt, et ex hoc proles vitiata ac corrupta creatur.'’’ But on reading the whole chapter it becomes evident that, far from relying upon facts or even a personal conviction, he has no other basis for this asser- tion than the belief of Hippocrates in the conformity of the semen with the peculiarities of the individual by whom it is secreted. Let us admit, however, that some of the developments of this doctrine appear to be proper to him. Thus, he says, children are more severely infected when the infection is derived from the mother, because they then accjuire the disease from a double source, generation and lactation.'’^ But among these definite assertions, justified though they have been by later experience, we do not meet with a single observation, or even a description! Perhaps, after all, we ought not to be much surprised at the gaps which we meet with in the works of the writers of this period. Where could they have found room for facts in the midst of their interminable disser- tations on the primitive seat of the French disease, which they assume, almost unanimously, to be the liver ; on its essential cause,