Greetings, fellow historico-medico aficionados and welcome to the triumphant return of , our semi-regular segment devoted to the medically weird. Kevin here to give you another tale of mildly-interesting medical miscellany. Past installments examined such topics as , , and .
Today's installment is inspired by a presentation I recently delivered to visitors to the Mütter Museum on the subject of . Visitors that day got to see books related to the disease from our , including , and handle reproductions of objects in our robust collection while learning about the history of the disease.
Syphilis has been around for a long time. Today, it is treated through antibiotics; however, before the popularization of antibiotics in the 1940s, physicians attempted a wide variety of treatments, many of which were just as bad, if not worse, than the disease itself.
Let's start by with a brief introduction to syphilis. Syphilis aka is caused by the treponema pallidum bacteria and is spread through skin-to-skin contact with syphilitic lesions, usually during sexual contact. There are a few conflicting theories of where its specific origins lie, although there appears to be some consensus that it evolved as a strain of one of several other bone/skin conditions such as or . The earliest outbreak that is attributed to syphilis in Europe took place in Naples in 1494/1495, and there are some who argue the first strains of the disease came to the Continent aboard Christopher Columbus' return trip from the New World in 1493.
The disease generally follows a four-stage pattern. The first, aptly named primary syphilis, is characterized by the appearance of a large sore known as a chancre at the site of infection. Aside from being unsightly, patients with primary syphilis don't feel any discomfort and the chancre will go away on its own after about three to six weeks. During the second stage, again aptly named secondary syphilis, the infected patient will generally have a rash or skin lesions and can also exhibit symptoms similar to the flu such as fever, sore throat, swollen lymph nodes, muscle aches, and fatigue. Secondary syphilis has also been known to cause hair loss. As with its chancrous predecessor, these symptoms will go away on their own after a few weeks after which the disease enters its latent phase (which, you guessed it, is called latent syphilis) where a patient exhibits no outward symptoms. Syphilis can lie dormant in a person's system for up to thirty years!
When syphilis reawakens after its latent stage is when the real health problems begin. During the syphilis' final form, known as tertiary syphilis, the disease beings to attack the body, particularly the skin and skeleton. Syphilis causes bone and skin to deteriorate, leaving disfiguring lesions on the patient's face. Tertiary syphilis can also spread to other organ systems, such as the eyes (ocular syphilis) or brain (neurosyphilis).
Historic treatments were often just as bad, if not worse, for a syphilitic patient than the disease itself. Mercury was the most popular treatment for syphilis before the twentieth century; mercury treatments gave birth to a common phrase associated with the disease: "A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury." According to the , prolonged exposure to mercury can lead to respiratory, gastrointestinal, and neurological damage. In 1909, chemist Paul Ehlich developed an alternative to mercury therapy: Compound 606 aka Salvarsan. Named because it was the 606th trial chemical, Salvarsan is generally acknowledged as the first modern chemotherapy treatment, and Elrich went on to become the co-winner of the . While considered effective in mitigating the early symptoms of syphilis, Salvarsan introduced another potentially deadly treatment: it was chock full of arsenic. According to the , short term exposure to arsenic can cause vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, numbness, and (depending on the level of exposure) death. Long-term exposure has been linked to skin, lung, and bladder cancers (long-time readers will recall arsenic , although this was later disproven following an autopsy). Elrich eventually developed a replacement for Salvarsan, the creatively-named Neosalvarsan aka Compound 914, which contained slightly less arsenic; Neosalvarsan was the predominant treatment until the 1940s.
During the 1920s, Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Juaregg developed a novel approach to treating syphilis: infecting people with malaria. Malariotherapy is a branch of treatments that involves battling infection by inducing a high body temperature, a treatment generally known as pyrotherapy or fever therapy. Malaria is a potentially-useful pyrotherapy tool as it causes a high fever () and is curable with quinine. Wagner-Juaregg injected late-stage syphilitic patients with malaria and observed the parasite-induced fever's efficacy in treating neurosyphilis. For his efforts, Wagner-Juaregg earned the . Despite , malariotherapy became a fairly common treatment for syphilis well through the 1950s. However, modern scientists have been divided as to its efficacy, citing in part Wagner-Juaregg's . Incidentally, in more recent years, malariotherapy has been proposed as a treatment for HIV (see and ) and () Lyme Disease.
Fortunately, syphilis is easily treatable today with penicillin, which, although penicillin allergies are not uncommon, does not cause the severe long-term health repercussions of its heavy-metal predecessors. Also, using protection, such as condoms, during sexual intercourse can also prevent the spread of syphilis.