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.

    154/292 (page 138)
    ON SYPHILIS IN NEW-BORN CHILDREN. Grouped togetlier, these facts appear to me to tlirow a light upon the actual points at issue^ which admits of their being decided in one way only. If the presence of syphilis is demonstrated in the parents; if one and the same woman, who went to the full time before having it, miscarries from the moment of contracting it; if she then has indiscriminately miscarriages or living but syphilitic children; if mercury cures the latter; if, lastly, mercury imparts to her the faculty of bringing to a happy termination the pregnancies which occur subsequently to its administration, then has syphilis evidently been the sole agent here, and it would be the grossest as well as the most dangerous error to suppose its antidote to be an ally. ^ The preceding observations suffice to show the period and the circumstances under which abortion supervenes. I am only anxious, as I wish to utilise this idea hereafter, to call attention to the fact that syphilis did not proceed from the father alone in any of those which I have just brought forward. This result would appear to refute the notion of Prieur, adopted by Lloyd and Wade. The first asserts, in fact, that abortions resulting from syphilis occur earlier; the two others, that they are more frequent when it is from infection in the father than Avdieii it is from that in the mother that the cause proceeds. Our observations do not authorise us to deny this assertion, but they do not any more oblige us to admit it; and it appears to me, on the contrary, that the mother—who furnishes the ovum, then to that ovum the materials of its nutrition and development—has, if I may be permitted to use this expression, both more means and more time to act upon it than the father, whose vivifying action is only instantaneous. ]\Ioreover, to exhaust the question, it would be necessary to distinguish between the cases in which the mother wns syphilitic before conception and those in which she became so afterwards, a difference to which there is nothing to show that the writers quoted above have attached the importance which it deserves. Does abortion result from the disease in the mother or from the death of the foetus ? Gardanne decides the question arbitrarily in the first sense. It depends, he says, '‘’upon an extraordinary sensi- bility in the neck of the womb in sypliilitic women.” It is easy to conceive that a woman who has reached a degree of consti- tutional affection verging upon cachexia is no longer capable of resisting the physiological labour the integrity of which is necessary for normal gestation. Thus—