Woman by William J. Robinson (classic novels to read .txt) 📕

Spirocheta Pallida, or Treponema Pallidum, the Germ of Syphilis as Seen under the Microscope.

As stated before, syphilis is the most hereditary of all diseases. Fortunately, if the disease is still very active in the parents, particularly in the mother, the child is generally aborted. Some syphilitic mothers will have half a dozen or more miscarriages in succession. When the disease has become "attenuated," either by treatment or by itself—many diseases lose their virulence in time—the child may be carried to term. It then may be born dead, or it may be born strongly syphilitic, and die in a few days or weeks, or it may be born without any signs of syphilis and be apparently healthy and then develop the disease at the age of ten, twelve, fourteen, or later, or it may be born healthy and remain healthy. But no woman who had syphilis, or whose husband had syphilis, should dare to conceive or to give birth to a child unless she has been given permission by a competent physician. I mean just what I say. It is not a personal matter. A woman has a right to marry a syphilitic husband if she wants to and run the risk of contracting syphilis. Her body is her own, and if she does it with her eyes open it is her affair. But a woman has no right to bring into the world syphilitic or syphilitically tainted children. Here society has a right to interfere.

Syphilis runs a milder course in women than it does in men. But this milder course is not an unmixed blessing; it may be considered a misfortune, because, the same as gonorrhea in women, syphilis is often present for months and years until it has made such inroads that it is but little amenable to treatment. In many women the disease runs such a mild course, as far as definite symptoms are concerned, that they are sure they never had anything the matter with them, and they are perfectly sincere in their denial of ever having had any infection. Often it is only when they complain of obscure symptoms, for which we can find no explanation, and then take a Wassermann test, that we discover what the real trouble is. And then the internal organs are sometimes found so deeply affected that it is hard to do anything. So it is seen that the mildness of the course of the disease, while a good thing in itself, is bad in that respect that it prevents timely treatment. It is therefore important that whenever a woman is in any way suspicious that she may have the disease that she have herself examined; and if she has reasons to suspect that her husband or partner has the disease, she should persuade him to have himself examined.

Locomotor ataxia, one of the most terrible sequelæ of syphilis, is much more rare in women than it is in men. So is general paresis, also called general paralysis of the insane, or softening of the brain.

There is one other minor disease belonging to the venereal diseases; that is chancroids. Chancroids are little ulcers on the genitals; they are purely local and do not affect the system. They are due largely to uncleanliness, and are found only among the poorer classes of prostitutes and therefore among the poorer classes of men. One sees them now and then in public dispensaries, but in private practice they are now quite rare. They used to be quite common, which shows that the general level of cleanliness has been raised considerably among all classes of people. At any rate, chancroids are of little significance, as compared with syphilis and gonorrhea, and when speaking of the venereal peril, these are the two diseases we have in mind.