Syphilis
Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by bacteria. It infects the genital area, lips, mouth, or anus of both men and women. You usually get syphilis from sexual contact with someone who has it. It can also pass from mother to baby during pregnancy.
The early stage of syphilis usually causes a single, small, painless sore. Sometimes it causes swelling in nearby lymph nodes. If you do not treat it, syphilis usually causes a non-itchy skin rash, often on your hands and feet. Many people do not notice symptoms for years. Symptoms can go away and come back.
The sores caused by syphilis make it easier to get or give someone HIV during sex. If you are pregnant, syphilis can cause complications, or you could lose your baby. In rare cases, syphilis causes serious health problems and even death.
Syphilis is easy to cure with antibiotics if you catch it early. Correct usage of latex condoms greatly reduces, but does not completely eliminate, the risk of catching or spreading syphilis. If your or your partner is allergic to latex, you can use polyurethane condoms. The most reliable way to avoid infection is to not have anal, vaginal, or oral sex.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Physician's Therapeutics Memoranda on Syphilis
Habitual abortion may be due to syphilis, to endo-metritis or uterine displacement. to undue sexual excitement or to anemia or other form of malnutrition. Prevention of the accident in such cases depends upon recognizing and removing the cause. The patient must be given the benefit of the best hygienic conditions; avoid irri tant cathartics, regulating the bowels with compound liquorice powder or cascara sagrada; prescribe Uterotonic, N., B. & Co. or other Uterine Sedative; avoid large doses of quinine. - If abortion seems imminent, keep the patient at rest and give an opiate (morphine hypodermatically or opium extract by injection or suppository). If these measures fail, an aseptic tampon must be introduced and fluid extract of ergot must be given, the after treatment consisting of antiseptic irrigation of the vagina and if necessary of the uterus. absolute rest and small doses of ergot and quinine. Ergot must al ways be used with proper caution, and only a physiologically stand ardized preparation should be employed.1
Apply a20per cent. solution of cocaine as a local anesthetic, then cauterize with nitric acid. Dress afterwards with Iodosyl. Treat constitutionally ior syphilis.1
The usual treatment is by mercurials (mercurous iodide, blue mass. mercury and chalk or corrosive sublimate. the first being generally given preference) continued up to the point of tolerance as much as eighteen months. followed by a course of potassium iodide, sometimes combined still with mercury. Vegetable alteratives are generally prescribed also, and the mercury is sometimes reinforced by combination with gold, as in the Solution Gold and Arsenic Bro mide with Mercury, N., B. & Co.1