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Updated: June 27, 2025
If the cause of syphilis had not been known, and the disease not given to animals, the discovery of salvarsan might never have been made. After extensive experiments on syphilitic rabbits, which showed that the drug could be given safely in amounts large enough to cure the animal at a single dose, it was tried on man, two physicians, Drs. Hoppe and Wittneben, volunteering for the test.
Ehrlich conceived the whole make-up and properties of salvarsan when most of us find it a hardship to pronounce its name. Schaudinn saw with the ordinary lenses of the microscope in the living, moving germ, what dozens can scarcely see today with the germ glued to the spot and with all the aid of stains and dark-field apparatus.
It is one of the tragedies of the modern private practice of medicine that the physician has so often to consult the patient's purse in giving or withholding salvarsan, and for that reason, except in the well-to-do, it is seldom used to the best advantage.
Hospital and dispensary treatment of venereal diseases is almost entirely in semi-private hands, and a recent investigation of clinics and dispensaries for the treatment of syphilis and gonorrhea in New York city, for example, showed that many of them were so poorly equipped and run at such unreasonable hours that they were frequented only by vagabonds, were of no value in the early recognition of syphilis, could not administer salvarsan under conditions to which a discriminating patient would dare to trust himself, and made no pretense at following their cases beyond the door or discharging them from medical care as cured.
"X ," I said, "If you will pledge me your honor as a gentleman never to take another chance and not to marry until I say you are cured I will use salvarsan on you, which is just about as scarce as gold now, and give you a chance for abortive cure." He pledged himself, and six months later there was every sign that we were going to secure a perfect result.
Whenever one talks to a person who knows something about the advances in knowledge in the past few years about the treatment of syphilis, and goes into detail about mercury, the odds are two to one that he will be interrupted by the question, "But what about '606'?" Before talking about salvarsan, or "606," it is well to say here that this new drug, wonderful though it is, has in no sense done away with the necessity for the use of mercury in the treatment of syphilis.
In behalf of sanitary control of prostitution, leaving out of the question its moral aspect, it must be admitted that Neisser, probably the greatest authority on the sexual diseases, believed that, as far as syphilis is concerned, the use of salvarsan as a means of preventing infection from prostitutes has never had a satisfactory trial.
The publicity which has been given to this form of treatment has led many patients to take matters into their own hands and to go to a physician and ask him to give them a dose of salvarsan, much as they might order a highball on a cold day.
+Cheap Salvarsan.+ Before a general campaign for the successful treatment of syphilis can be made a fact, salvarsan must become, as has already been pointed out, a public and not a private asset. It must be available to all who need it at the lowest possible cost practically that of manufacture and must be supplied by the state when necessary.
Both salvarsan and neosalvarsan are yellow powders, which must be manufactured under the most exacting precautions, to prevent their being intensely poisonous, and must be sealed up in glass tubes to prevent their spoiling in the air. They were formerly administered by dissolving them or by mixing with oil and then injecting them into the muscles, much as mercury is given by injection.
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