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Updated: June 27, 2025
The few stragglers who escape the fate of the main army are picked up by subsequent doses of salvarsan and mercury, and a cure is assured. There is all the difference between stopping a charge with a machine gun and stopping it with a single-shot rifle, in the relative effectiveness of salvarsan and mercury at the beginning of a syphilitic infection.
Variations of this rule must be allowed only with great conservatism, since salvarsan, on whose efficiency many pleas for a shortening of probation have been based, is still too recent an addition to our implements of warfare to justify a rash dependence upon it.
+Efficient Treatment.+ The third essential is efficient treatment, about the nature of which there is still some dispute. The controversy, however, is mainly about details. In the modern methods for treatment of syphilis both salvarsan and mercury are used, as a rule, and keep the patient decidedly busy for the first year taking rubs and injections, and pretty busy for the second.
But though mercury is efficient, it is slow, and the greater rapidity of action of salvarsan and its power to control infectious lesions give it a unique place. The combination of the two is powerful enough to fully justify the statement that none of the great scourges of the human race offers its victim a better prospect of recovery than does syphilis. Is a cure worth while?
Some are stunted in their growth and develop their sexual characteristics very late or imperfectly. It is one of the wonders of medicine to see a sickly runt of a child at fifteen or sixteen develop in a few months into a very presentable young man or girl under the influence of salvarsan and mercury. A few syphilitic children seem robust and healthy from the start.
The modern medical treatment using mercury and Salvarsan in alternation, has been very successful. It is claimed that by following it, syphilis may be totally cured if taken in hand during the first stage. The sores developed during the first two or three years of the disease are very infectious.
+The Importance of Salvarsan.+ Salvarsan is an absolute essential in the treatment of those early infections in which an abortive cure can be hoped for, and in them it must be begun without a day's delay.
The cost of salvarsan under present conditions is a burden that few can hope to assume to the extent that modern treatment tends to require, and the slower methods of treatment are more of a tax on the patient's courage and determination, and less effective in preventing the danger of infectiousness, although quite as reliable for cure.
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.
Soon after this use for salvarsan was discovered, I caused a liberal supply of it to be sent to the Bontoc Hospital. For some time we were unable to persuade any victims of yaws to undergo treatment, but finally we found one at Barlig who was guilty of a minor criminal offence, arrested him, and took him to Bontoc. Instead of putting him in jail there, we sent him to the hospital for treatment.
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