Syphilis : introductory address to the discussion on syphilis at the Australasian Medical Congress / H.B. Allen.

  • Allen, Harry Brookes, 1854-1926.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Syphilis : introductory address to the discussion on syphilis at the Australasian Medical Congress / H.B. Allen. 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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    Reprinted from the “ Intercolonial Medical Journal oJ_ Australasia,” March igog. INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS TO THE DISC AT THE AUSTRALASIAN MEDICAL C V •- C7J 20 JUL 09 PROFESSOR H. B. ALLEN, M.D., President of the Congress. The request that I should open this 'debate with a short address enables me to bring before you the conclusions that have been gradually forced upon me by experience during the past 32 years in the pathological department of the Melbourne Hospital, and in the pathological museum and laboratories of the University of Melbourne. In the first place, the time-honoured diagnostics of syphilis leave much to be desired. The histories given by patients cannot be trusted. The common entry in case-books, “ No history of Syphilis, ’ is almost worthless. In post-mortem practice, erup- tions, nodes, changes in the teeth and external lesions of the eyes are infrequent and of relatively little value. The great marks of syphilis are in the arterial walls, to which the spiro- chastes soon betake themselves in experimental syphilis. No other cause than syphilis can, in my opinion, account for the pre- cocious forms of atheroma, when delicate linear opacities appear in the descending aorta at about the age of fifteen, and change from white to yellow during the next decade, or when small abruptly prominent rounded patches arise in the ascending aorta between twenty and thirty, and soon pass into the yellow stage. Apart from atheroma praecox, which belongs mainly to inherited syphilis, all cases of severe ulcerous atheroma must be attributed to tertiary syphilis; and also, at the other extreme, the slow atrophic form with closely set wrinkling of the surface, this