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Updated: June 27, 2025
In some cases it may even be necessary to insist that the patient submit to a special test, called the provocative test, in which a small injection of salvarsan is used to bring out a positive blood test if there is a concealed syphilis. These are, of course, measures which are seldom necessary except in patients who have had the disease.
But allowing for this, if it becomes possible to apply mercury and salvarsan as thoroughly to the prevention and treatment of syphilis as quinin can be applied to malaria, syphilis will soon be a rarity over the larger part of the civilized world.
In the next twenty years the introduction of salvarsan will probably result in a wave of serious late syphilis, the result of cases insufficiently treated in the early days of its use.
And then the reversed miracle takes place, unfortunately too rarely! The disordered mind, the altered character, leaps upward to its old place, after being dosed by the marvelous drug Salvarsan, created by the German Jewish scientist, Paul Ehrlich. Of extraordinary interest are the rare cases of loss of personal identity seen after brain injury, say in war.
But there are at the present time, undoubtedly, many persons who received a single dose of salvarsan for a syphilis contracted at this time, and who today, having never seen any further outward signs of the disease, believe themselves cured, when in reality they are not.
To make the giving of salvarsan safe, the judgment, experience, and training of the specialist are not too much to ask. The dangers of salvarsan are easily exaggerated, and some people have a foolish fear of it. The wonderful thing about the drug is that, with all the possibility for harm that one might expect in it, it so seldom makes any trouble.
The physician's prayer is the diphtheria antitoxin, which in his hands is the life-saving device. When the physician administers quinine for malaria, or salvarsan for syphilis, he effects cures for these diseases by using agents to which the clergy strenuously objected when they were first introduced.
The first dose may light the eruption up a little, but this is only because the drug stirs the germs up before it kills them, and improvement begins promptly within a few hours or a day or two. The first characteristic of salvarsan which we should bear in mind especially, in our interest in the social aspects of syphilis, is then the rapidity rather than the thoroughness of its action.
Advertising, for example, would be nothing but gigantic and systematic lying if almost everybody didn't know that it was. Yet it runs into the sinister all the time. The pure food agitation is largely an effort to make the label and the contents tell the same story. It was noteworthy that, following the discovery of salvarsan or "606" by Dr.
For this reason iodids must always be used in connection with mercury or salvarsan if the disease itself is to be influenced. It is occasionally difficult to get patients to understand this after they have once taken "drops," as the medicine is often called. Otherwise the use of iodids in syphilis is of medical rather than general interest.
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