56 SPIROCILETES 



follows: A little serum from the suspected person is mixed with 

 an extract of liver or heart and some guinea pig serum and in- 

 cubated a short time. A suspension of blood corpuscles and a 

 hemolytic serum is then added and the mix- 

 ture is incubated again. If the suspected serum 

 is not syphilitic the blood corpuscles are dis- 

 solved by this mixture and the serum becomes 

 red, whereas if the serum is syphilitic no change 

 in the blood corpuscles takes place, and they 

 sink to the bottom. The more highly syphi- 

 FIG. 9. Wassermann litic the individual the more complete is the 

 Reaction. Neg., nega- sedimentation of the corpuscles. As stated 



tive; Pos., positive. if ji -vi < ,1 



before there are possible sources of error in this 

 test, but if properly made with standard reagents, and with suffi- 

 cient control tests, it can be confidently relied upon. 



Treatment. There are many quack doctors who are still 

 practicing the same inefficient methods of curing syphilis that were 

 in vogue several centuries ago. Syphilitic sores are powdered 

 and cauterized and cured, and the patient is given to believe 

 that his disease is cured. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the 

 course of the disease is of such a nature that the doctor's claim of 

 having cured may be borne out for months or years before the 

 insidious disease appears again, this time in a much more de- 

 structive and perhaps incurable state. Superficial treatment of 

 syphilis sores, accompanied perhaps by a few " tonic " pills, in 

 no way destroys the virulence of the parasites or alters the future 

 course of the disease. It merely makes the chance of correctly 

 diagnosing the disease more difficult, and it frequently results in an 

 unsuspecting victim carrying the disease untreated to a stage 

 where it has wrought irreparable damage to himself, his life-mate 

 and his children. 



Treatment of the disease formerly consisted in the adminis- 

 tration of mercuric chloride. While this sometimes effected an 

 apparently complete cure, over 80 per cent of syphilitics suffered 

 relapses in spite of the most persistent treatment. In 1910 

 Ehrlich, after years of experimentation, offered humanity his 

 famous preparation, " No. 606," known as salvarsan, an arsenic 

 compound which is deadly to spirochsetes. When this drug is 

 injected into the veins of a syphilitic, it almost immediately 

 kills all the spirochsetes except a few which have stowed away in 



