The Third Great Plague

The Third Great Plague

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Title: The Third Great Plague A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday
People
Author: John H. Stokes
Release Date: May 6, 2006 [EBook #18324]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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The Third Great Plague

A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People
By
John H. Stokes, A.B., M.D.
Chief of the Section of Dermatology and Syphilology The Mayo Clinic,
Rochester, Minnesota
Assistant Professor of Medicine The Mayo Foundation Graduate
School of the University of Minnesota
Philadelphia and London W. B. Saunders Company 1920

Published, November, 1917
Copyright, 1917, by W. B. Saunders Company
Reprinted July, 1918
Reprinted February, 1920
PRINTED IN AMERICA

PREFACE
The struggle of man against his unseen and silent enemies, the lower or
bacterial forms of life, once one becomes alive to it, has an irresistible
fascination. More dramatic than any novel, more sombre and terrifying
than a battle fought in the dark, would be the intimate picture of the
battle of our bodies against the hosts of disease. If we could see with
the eye of the microscope and feel and hear with the delicacy of
chemical and physical interactions between atoms, the heat and
intensity and the savage relentlessness of that battle would blot out all
perception of anything but itself. Just as there are sounds we cannot
hear, and light we cannot see, so there is a world of small things, living

in us and around us, which sways our destiny and carries astray the best
laid schemes of our wills and personalities. The gradual development
of an awareness, a realization of the power of this world of minute
things, has been the index of progress in the bodily well-being of the
human race through the centuries marking the rebirth of medicine after
the sleep of the Dark Ages.
In these days of sanitary measures and successful public health activity,
it is becoming more and more difficult for us to realize the terrors of
the Black Plagues, the devastation, greater and more frightful than war,
which centuries ago swept over Europe and Asia time and again,
scarcely leaving enough of the living to bury the dead. Cholera,
smallpox, bubonic plague, with terrifying suddenness fell upon a world
of ignorance, and each in turn humbled humanity to the dust before its
invisible enemies. Even within our own recollection, the germ of
influenza, gaining a foothold inside our defenses, took the world by
storm, and beginning probably at Hongkong, within the years 1889-90,
swept the entire habitable earth, affecting hundreds of thousands of
human beings, and leaving a long train of debilitating and even
crippling complications.
Here and there through the various silent battles between human beings
and bacteria there stand out heroic figures, men whose powers of mind
and gifts of insight and observation have made them the generals in our
fight against the armies of disease. But their gifts would have been
wasted had they lacked the one essential aid without which leadership
is futile. This is the force of enlightened public opinion, the backing of
the every-day man. It is the coöperation of every-day men, acting on
the organized knowledge of leaders, which has made possible the
virtual extinction of the ancient scourges of smallpox, cholera, and
bubonic plague.
Just as certain diseases are gradually passing into history through
human effort, and the time is already in sight when malaria and yellow
fever, the latest objects of attack, will disappear before the campaign of
preventive medicine, so there are diseases, some of them ancient, others
of more recent recognition, which are gradually being brought into the

light of public understanding. Conspicuous among them is a group of
three, which, in contrast to the spectacular course of great epidemics,
pursue their work of destruction quietly, slowly undermining, in their
long-drawn course, the very foundations of human life. Tuberculosis,
or consumption, now the best known of the three, may perhaps be
called the first of these great plagues, not because it is the oldest or the
most wide-spread necessarily, but because it has been the longest
known and most widely understood by the world at large. Cancer, still
of unknown cause, is the second great modern plague.