There is something awe-inspiring in the quiet way in which one great
victory has succeeded another in the battle against syphilis in the last
decade. If we are out of the current of these things, in the office or
the store, or in the field of industry and business, announcements from
the great laboratories of the world seldom reach us, and when they do,
they have an impractical sound, an unreality for us. So one hears, as if
in a speaking-tube from a long distance, the words that Schaudinn and
Hoffmann, on April 19, 1905, discovered the germ that causes syphilis,
not realizing that the fact contained in those few brief words can alter
the undercurrent of human history, and may, within the lives of our
children and our children's children, remake the destiny of man on the
earth. A great spirit lives in the work of men like Metchnikoff and Roux
and Maisonneuve, who made possible the prophylaxis of syphilis, in that
of Bordet and Wassermann, who devised the remarkable blood test for the
disease, and in that of Ehrlich and Hata, who built up by a combination
of chemical and biological reasoning, salvarsan, one of the most
powerful weapons in existence against it. Ehrlich conceived the whole
make-up and properties of salvarsan when most of us find it a hardship
to pronounce its name. Schaudinn saw with the ordinary lenses of the
microscope in the living, moving germ, what dozens can scarcely see
today with the germ glued to the spot and with all the aid of stains and
dark-field apparatus. After all, it is brain-power focused to a point
that moves events, and to the immensity of that power the history of our
growing knowledge of syphilis bears the richest testimony.




Chapter II