106 
CHARLES F. RING. 
it can be incontestably proved that from the remotest antiquity 
the diseases which it designates were known.” 
We have no disposition to find fault with the above definitions 
when confined to their proper places; there they will be accept¬ 
able to all. As it is, they are not only incorrect, but misleading. 
For instance, who would think of applying the first definition to 
syphilis at any time since the epidemic, or call the “ diseases” in 
the “ last sense ” syphilitic ? Jourdan forgets to use the words 
general or constitutional disease, and also that syphilis cannot be 
used in the plural, to signify more than one form of affection ; 
hence these maladies cannot be called syphilitic, but venereal. It 
has been admitted all along that sundry venereal affections were 
known to remotest antiquity, only that no constitutional (syphilitic) 
disease was recognized until near the close of the fifteenth cen¬ 
tury. Jourdan, we infer, must be a “ unicist.” 
Grauvoge tells us (Text Book of Homoeopathy, part 2d, p. 3J8) 
that he has “ found in the results of coitus with all precision from 
one and the same cause threefold effects, which certainly here as 
well as there are only referable to the different variety of the 
conditions, to the variety of the bodily constitution. Thus, before 
such a disease can develop itself, the conditions for it must first 
be given, and only within and in connection with the hydrogenoid 
constitution does the venereal poison become the cause of the 
sycotic secretion of the so-called gonorrhoea. It can produce 
gonorrhoeal us well as ulcers ; but these are not cured or benefitted 
by mercury, but are aggravated, and if the gonorrhoea is removed 
by injections of nitrate of silver, and such ulcer is cauterized or 
otherwise removed, not radically cured by internal remedies, the 
gonorrhoeal dyscrasia is always produced; as by cauterizing the 
syphilitic chancre the so-called chancre dyscrasia is produced 
upon the soil of the oxygenoid constitution,” etc. 
From this it will be clearly seen that Grauvoge looks upon 
the syphilitic poison only as a relative poison, and not as a specific 
one, as modern science inclines to view it. Also that (just here) 
he is in full accord with the doctrines of the “ physiological 
school,” founded by Broussais, which, in this department at least, 
is obsolete. 
Baumler writes : “The first knowledge of syphilis, as a separate 
