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Repeated negative Wassermann tests on the blood over several years, especially after treatment is stopped, are an essential sign of cure. This must be reinforced, as a rule, by a searching examination of the nervous system, including a test on the fluid of the spinal cord. This is especially necessary when we have used some of the quick methods of cure, like the abortive treatment.
Good treatment early in a case of syphilis usually makes the Wassermann test negative in a comparatively short time, and even a little treatment will do it in some cases. But will it stay negative if treatment is then stopped? In the high percentage of cases it will not. It will become positive again after a variable interval, showing that the disease has been suppressed but not destroyed.
It is even possible to have the roof fall out of the mouth from gummatous changes and the Wassermann test yet be negative. It is equally possible, though unusual, for a negative Wassermann test to be coincident with contagious sores in the mouth or on the genitals. So it is apparent that as an infallible test for syphilis it is not an unqualified success.
There does not seem to be any good reason why a Wassermann test should not be made part of the examination which every intelligent mother expects a physician to make at the beginning of her pregnancy.
The extent to which some overconfident persons fail in their efforts to treat and cure themselves explains the necessity for such a warning. +Effect of Mercurial Treatment on the Blood Test.+ The effect of mercury on the Wassermann blood test for syphilis should also be generally understood.
This older idea has been largely given up, chiefly as a result of the enormous mass of evidence which the Wassermann test has brought to light about the condition of mothers who bear syphilitic children, but themselves show no outward sign of the disease.
"A fancy which in its luxurious revelling in blood, splendor, and magnificence seems to us as Oriental as his meditative dreaminess and the subtle satisfaction with which he traces the subterranean, labyrinthine paths of the life of the soul" these are the salient features which Wolzogen finds in the work of Wassermann.
This means, for example, that even though the husband with syphilis may have married years after the usual period of infectiousness has passed, his wife, though outwardly healthy, should have a Wassermann test, and his children would be none the worse for an examination, even though they seem normal.
One of these two stories is the Clarissa Mirabel here translated, and no word need be said of the technical virtuosity with which the most exquisite climax is attained through the utmost economy of means. Many critics regard Wassermann as the pioneer of a new epic style.
When a positive Wassermann reaction is present before treatment is commenced, the above course is prolonged as follows: for three weeks is given a course of potassium iodide, after which four more weekly injections of 0.6
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