so familiar in its early history. The masses of sores, the literal
falling to pieces of skeletons, are replaced by the inconspicuous but no
less real deaths from heart and brain and other internal diseases, the
losses to sight and hearing, the crippling and death of children, and
all the insidious, quiet deterioration and degeneration of our fiber
which syphilis brings about. From devouring a man alive on the street,
syphilis has taken to knifing him quietly in his bed.

Although syphilis sprang upon the world from ambush, so to speak, it did
the world one great service--it aroused Medicine from the sleep of the
Middle Ages. Many of the greatest names in the history of the art are
inseparably associated with the progress of our knowledge of this
disease. As Pusey points out, it required the force of something wholly
unprecedented to take men away from tradition and the old stock in trade
of ideas and formulas, and to make them grasp new things. Syphilis was
the new thing of the time in the sixteenth century and the study which
it received went far toward putting us today in a position to control
it. Before the beginning of the twentieth century almost all that
ordinary observation of the diseased person could teach us was known of
syphilis. It needed only laboratory study, such as has been given it
during the past fifteen years, to put us where we could appeal to every
intelligent man and woman to enlist in a brilliantly promising campaign.
For a time syphilis was confused with gonorrhea, and there could be no
better proof of the need for separating the two in our minds today than
to study the way in which this confusion set back progress in our
knowledge of syphilis. John Hunter, who fathered the idea of the
identity of the two diseases, sacrificed his life to his idea
indirectly. Ricord, a Frenchman, whose name deserves to be immortal, set
Hunter's error right, and as the father of modern knowledge of syphilis,
prepared us for the revolutionary advances of the last ten years.