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The cerebrospinal fluid revealed some abnormal changes which were suggestive of an organic brain disease. The Wassermann test was negative. Finally, he made a complete recovery except for the incomplete amnesia. Since the death of the young woman was caused by strangulation, the question had to be decided whether he was the cause of her death or she died as the result of her own hand.
A Wassermann blood test with a thorough examination is the least that should be expected where any exchanges are to take place. Nothing whatever should be taken for granted in such cases, and the necessary examinations and questions should not give offense to either party to the bargain. Syphilis is not a respecter of persons, and exists among the rich as well as among the poor.
Typical examples of such premature legislation may be found in the setting up of the Wassermann test as evidence of fitness for marriage by certain states, and in the efforts of certain official agencies to enforce the reporting of syphilis and gonorrhea by name. Proposals to quarantine and placard all syphilis are in the same category, though seriously entertained by some.
+Difficulties of the Test.+ The Wassermann blood test for syphilis is one of the most complex tests in medicine. The theory of it is beyond the average man's comprehension. A large number of factors enter into the production of a correct result, and the attaining of that result involves a high degree of technical skill and a large experience. It is no affair for the amateur.
Imagine estimating philosophers by their chest expansions, their blood pressures, their Wassermann reactions! The so-called social diseases, over which eugenists raise such a pother, are surely not the worst curses that mankind has to bear. Some of the greatest men in history have had them; whole nations have had them and survived.
In these cases, salvarsan and mercury, carefully given, seem not only not harmful to mother and child, but may entirely prevent the child's getting the disease. For this reason every maternity hospital or ward should be in a position to make good Wassermann blood tests, conduct expert examinations, and give thorough treatment to women who are found to have syphilis.
Just as a negative test may occur while syphilis is still actively present and doing damage in the body, so a positive Wassermann test may persist long after all outward and even inward signs of the disease have disappeared. These fixed positives are still a puzzle to physicians.
Agencies which arrange for the adoption of children are now much more careful about the matter than formerly, and a Wassermann test on the mother and also on the child, as well as a careful history in the case of the mother, is frequently available.
Sultry sensuality and outrageous bombast characterize the work, the action of which is not clearly set forth, but floats in a sea of nebulous somnambulistic vagueness. Visionary representation and mythical creation are indeed the program which Wassermann lays out for himself in a theoretical treatise, The Art of Narrative.
A great spirit lives in the work of men like Metchnikoff and Roux and Maisonneuve, who made possible the prophylaxis of syphilis, in that of Bordet and Wassermann, who devised the remarkable blood test for the disease, and in that of Ehrlich and Hata, who built up by a combination of chemical and biological reasoning, salvarsan, one of the most powerful weapons in existence against it.
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