292 MICROBES AND TOXINS 



ever, permitted the campaign of prophylaxis ; the patients 

 thus treated had no longer parasites in their blood and could 

 not therefore furnish the glossina carriers with new supplies of 

 virus. 



Mild cases were cured after a treatment of from four to six 

 months. At the end of 1907 Koch calculated that the death- 

 rate among the treated individuals was between a tenth and a 

 twentieth of what it had been among the non-treated. 



Relapses occur even among the patients treated from the 

 earliest period, and even 14 months after the treatment ceases. 

 The more intense the treatment the later the relapse. 



Soamin (atoxyl with one molecule of water in addition) was 

 apparently rather less toxic than atoxyl ; arsenophenylglycine 

 produces pain at the point of injection, but it seems to act 

 in patients in whom atoxyl fails. 



Of the remedies supplied by other chemical groups the best 

 hitherto is tartar-emetic injected intravenously. It ought to be 

 tried when atoxyl fails and the association of atoxyl with tartar- 

 emetic has often seemed better than either of these drugs 

 alone. With one injection per week it is possible to keep the 

 blood and glands free from trypanosomes. The combinations 

 atoxyl + mercury and atoxyl + sulphide of mercury (orpiment) 

 have been tried ; atoxyl remains the basis of all the remedies. 



The Treatment of Syphilis. Experimental study of 

 syphilis is quite recent and dates from the announcement of 

 Metchnikoff and Roux that the disease can be inoculated with 

 certainty in anthropoid apes, presenting not only the primary 

 symptoms, but secondary symptoms as in man. By his 

 discovery of the specific microbe, Schaudinn furnished us 

 (1905) with the best means of controlling under the microscope 

 both inoculation and treatment. For centuries the idea has 

 prevailed that syphilis is exclusively a human ailment ; since 

 1903 it has been transferred from man to the higher apes and 

 from these to the lower, and now it has been inoculated in 

 rabbits and guinea-pigs. Man however remains the chief. 



Six years ago the medical world would have been astonished 

 at a prediction that syphilis and the trypanosome diseases 



