536 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



cause of cancer, and the fount of great expense to the State, did 

 not exist until the fifteenth century. And, until recently, it has 

 been generally accepted that it is confined to human beings and 

 that it originated among the soldiers engaged in the later 

 crusades or among those who accompanied Columbus and 

 Cortez in the conquest of America. Yet, probably, the reason 

 why it is not mentioned in the classics is the same reason why 

 it is not mentioned in our public literature to-day ; syphilis is 

 not described in our public print even now in the twentieth 

 century, and as recently as July 1913 many of the London news- 

 papers declined to publish a calmly and carefully worded appeal 

 from the medical profession for an inquiry into the ravages of 

 the affection owing, apparently, to an inborn dread of the public 

 use of the word " syphilis." 



The discovery by Pasteur of the capabilities of bacteria to 

 cause disease and that of Ray Lankester of the powers of the 

 parasitic blood protozoa in producting distinct maladies, induced 

 a young research scholar named Klebs in 1897 (Archiv. /. 

 exper. Path.) to suggest that syphilis was due to a micro- 

 organism which he supposed is transmitted from one person to 

 another and from parents to children. But very little fruitful 

 work was done on the subject for twenty years, owing to the 

 insufficient methods of microscopy then in vogue, the results of 

 research being ineffectual. In the meantime, Koch had dis- 

 covered the bacillus of tuberculosis, Eberth and Gaffky that of 

 typhoid fever, Kitasato that of plague and Hansen that of 

 leprosy; and Laveran had found the protozoal blood-parasite 

 of malaria, Lewis that of trypanosomiasis — discoveries which 

 have led to the most important of practical results, namely, the 

 prevention of disease. But, until the last decade, nothing certain 

 or definite was known of the actual causative agent of syphilis ; 

 for, although much work was done and there were many 

 conjectures and theories, nothing was proven and no hypothesis 

 would bear critical examination. The methods of microscope 

 examination were inefficient and faulty. 



Early in the nineties, Louis Jenner invented his method of 

 staining dead cells by a compound stain, and eight years later 

 this method was improved upon by Romanowsky, whose 

 method was again modified by Nocht, Leishman, and finally 

 Giemsa. Then, in the years 1900-1, Losdorfer (Wien Klin. Woch. 

 1900) and Stassano (Acad, des Sciences, 1901) described peculiar 



