CHAPTER V. 

 SYPHILIS. 



ALTHOUGH syphilis has been well known for centuries, its 

 specific cause has only recently been discovered. The fact 

 that the disease had not been successfully communicated 

 to any of the lower animals was supposed to be a sufficient 

 explanation of the delay in recognizing it. Such has not, 

 however, proved to be the case, for in spite of the discovery 

 of Metschnikoff and Roux* that chimpanzees could be suc- 

 cessfully inoculated with virus from a human lesion, and the 

 confirmation of their work by Lassarf and others, and the 

 additional discovery of Metschnikoff and RouxJ that it is 

 also possible to infect macaques with syphilis, the specific 

 organism was, after all, discovered for the first time in 

 matter secured from human lesions. 



TREPONEMA (SPIROCH^ETE) PALLIDUM (SCHAUDINN AND 

 HOFFMANN). 



General Characteristics. A minute, slender, closely coiled, flexi- 

 ble spiral organism, motile, flagellated, not artificially cultivatable, 

 pathogenic for man and certain of the lower animals, staining by cer- 

 tain methods only and not by Gram's method. 



It has been known for a long time that preputial smegma 

 and various ulcerative lesions of the generative organs con- 

 tain certain spiral organisms. Bordet studied these with 

 some care, expecting to prove that they were concerned 

 with the etiology of syphilis, but it remained for Schaudinn 

 and Hoffmann to point out that there were two separate 

 species, one, which they called Spirochaete refringens, com- 

 monly found in ulcerative lesions of the genitalia, and 

 another, called Spirochaete pallida, later and more correctly 

 Treponema pallidum, found only in syphilitic lesions, and 



* "Ann. de 1'Inst. Pasteur," Dec., 1903, p. 809. 

 f "Berliner klin. Wochenschrift," 1903, p. 1189. 

 J "Annales," Jan., 1904. 



"Deutsche med. Wochenschrift," May 4, 1905. 

 420 



