A treatise on syphilis in new-born children and infants at the breast / by P. Diday ; translated by G. Whitley.

  • Diday, P. (Paul), 1812-1894.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on syphilis in new-born children and infants at the breast / by P. Diday ; translated by G. Whitley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    145/292 (page 129)
    PROGNOSIS. exceptionally dangerous, very exceptionally fatal, become one of the most active causes of death in carrying off infants at the breast. If the difference were the sole agent to be considered here, we ought to see its influence continue—decreasing, it is true—but con- tinue in an appreciable manner until adult age. Thus, cliildreii accidentally contracting primary chancres would undergo the saine chances of death as those who receive the infection from their parents. Children of fourteen or fifteen who contract syphilis by coitus would see its progress hastened and its prognosis, relatively to that of sypliilis in the adult, rendered unfavorable in direct ratio to their youth. There n ould, in a word, be degrees of severity according to age. But nothing is more false. Syphilis, so often fatal in new-born children when inherited from their parents, scarcely ever compromises their existence when it has been acci- dentally inocidated from a primary chancre in the adult. In short, whatever its origin may be, it has neither a different evolution nor more serious dangers for adolescence than for riper age. In the third and last place, congenital syphilis does not assume either the behaviour, the progress, or the concatenation of symptoms of the syphilis of adults. A little observation suffices to show that we have here two diseases analogous, but not identical; that if their prognoses differ, it is less on account of the age of the subjects they attack tlian from the nature and character peculiar to each of them. Producing, previous to any characteristic symptom, a kind of atrophy or stunted condition of the whole economy; breaking out afterwards at a huiubed points almost at the same moment; accompanied from the first by the visceral lesions foreign to acquired syphilis; contagious by its slightest symptoms, congenital s}-philis can be compared only to itself, and it is from its energy much more than from tlie weakness of its victims that we must ask the secret of the special dangers whieh it involves. Even when this source of error has been avoided, the truth is none the less difficult of discovery. Let us make the attempt, liow- ever. Eor my part, I attribute to two distinct but always combined causes the greater bancfulness of congenital sjqffiilis; first its mode of origin, then the conditions which induce its outbreak. When a grown-up man acquires constitutional syphilis, it pro- duces a deep-seated change in his organism; but this change, effected only by the aid of molecular reproduction in the body, 0