AN INQUIRY. 
51 
gonorrhoea and chancroid, but not syphilis, have existed from 
earliest antiquity. This position we can best maintain by review¬ 
ing the history of these local diseases. 
The physicians of the Greeks and Romans: Hippocrates, 
Celsus, HCtius, Actuarius, and others, speak of ulcers and excres¬ 
cences on the sexual organs, and of rhagades on the male parts, 
the anus and pudendum. The historians and poets mention the 
same, but nowhere is there the slightest evidence that a constitu¬ 
tional disease ever resulted therefrom. 
44 The writers of the middle ages,” says Renourd, 44 are more 
explicit than those of antiquity. William de Salicet, who lived 
in the thirteenth century, which is two hundred years before the 
outbreak of the syphilitic epidemic, says buboes often occurred 
after an impure coition, 4 quum accidet homini in virga corruptio, 
propter concubitum cum fseda muliere, aut ob aliam causam.’ 
Lefranc expressed himself more clearly still. The 4 ulcers on 
the penis,’ he says, 4 proceed either from hot pustules, which burst, 
or acrid humors, or from commerce with a woman who has been 
previously affected in the same manner.’ ”—[History of Medi¬ 
cine, 1856, p. 344.] 
Jahr writes: 44 What seems to be strange is, that in spite of 
the corrosive ulcers of which all make mention, and which seem 
to have been known to the Greeks and Romans, not one author 
seems to have directed attention to the consecutive phenomena 
that these ulcers may be followed by others in the mouth and 
throat, and which would not have escaped the attention of those 
earlier authors any more than that of the physicians of the six¬ 
teenth century, more especially since many of these consecutive 
phenomena in the present chancre syphilis, do not manifest them¬ 
selves at such a remote period after the primary symptoms, but 
that every observer must be struck by their internal pathological 
connection.”—[Venereal Diseases, p. 282.] 
Later still, the regulations in force governing the 44 houses of 
pleasure ” in London, in the years 1162 and 1430,* for the sup¬ 
pression of venereal diseases, tell us nothing beyond the bare fact 
that these affections existed, and to a considerable extent; and, 
surely, if secondary phenomena had followed any of them, 
descriptions of syphilis had certainly not been wanting. 
