place where it entered the body. At this time it can be permanently
cured by quick recognition and thorough treatment. There are no fixed
characteristics of the early stages of the disease, and it often escapes
attention entirely or is regarded as a trifle. The symptoms that follow
the spread of the disease over the body may be severe or mild, but they
seldom endanger life, and again often escape notice, leaving the victim
for some years a danger to other people from relapses about which he may
know nothing whatever. Serious syphilis is the late syphilis which
overtakes those whose earlier symptoms passed unrecognized or were
insufficiently treated. Late syphilis of the skin and bones, disfiguring
and horrible to look at, is less dangerous than the hidden syphilis of
the blood-vessels, the nerves, and the internal organs, which, under
cover of a whole skin and apparent health, maims and destroys its
victims. Locomotor ataxia and softening of the brain, early apoplexy,
blindness and deafness, paralysis, chronic fatal kidney and liver
disease, heart failure, hardening of the blood-vessels early in life,
with sudden or lingering death from any of these causes, are among the
ways in which syphilis destroys innocent and guilty alike. And yet, for
all its destructive power, it is one of the easiest of diseases to hold
in check, and if intelligently treated at almost any but the last
stages, can, in the great majority of cases, be kept from endangering
life.




Chapter VI

The Blood Test for Syphilis