Syphilis Quotes (6 quotes)
Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus
Syphilis or the French disease.
Syphilis or the French disease.
Title of a poem recounting the story of a shepherd, Syphilis, the first sufferer of the disease henceforth known by that name. Etymology given in Oxford English Dictionary.
A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.
[For centuries mercury was used as a treatment for syphilis.]
[For centuries mercury was used as a treatment for syphilis.]
Saying. In Michael J. O'Dowd and Elliot Philipp, The History of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (2000), 227.
I can think of a few microorganisms, possibly the tubercle bacillus, the syphilis spirochete, the malarial parasite, and a few others, that have a selective advantage in their ability to infect human beings, but there is nothing to be gained, in an evolutionary sense, by the capacity to cause illness or death. Pathogenicity may be something of a disadvantage for most microbes…
In 'Germs', The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974), 90.
It has been shown to be possible, by deliberately planned and chemotherapeutic approach, to discover curative agents which act specifically and aetiologically against diseases due to protozoal infections, and especially against the spirilloses, and amongst these against syphilis in the first place. Further evidence for the specificity of the action of dihydroxydiaminoarsenobenzene [Salvarsan ‘606’] is the disappearance of the Wasserman reaction, which reaction must … be regarded as indicative of a reaction of the organism to the constituents of the spirochaetes.
P. Ehrlich and S. Hata, 'Closing Notes to the Experimental Chemotherapy of Spirilloses', 1910. Reprinted in F. Himmelweit (ed.), The Collected Papers of Paul Ehrlich (1957), Vol. 3, 302.
It is steadily forgotten that health is a diathesis as much as is scrofula or syphilis and that each of these is a mode of growth.
In Fielding Hudson Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine (1929), 15.
The best patient is a millionaire with a positive Wassermann [antibody test for syphilis]. In Carl Malmberg , 140 Million Patients (1947), 30. Medical proverb before the discovery of antibiotics.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
