The History Of Syphilis

While working at the Rockefeller University (then the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research) in 1913, Hideyo Noguchi, a Japanese scientist, showed the presence of the spirochete Treponema pallidum in the brain of a patient progressive paralysis that Treponema pallidum was the cause of the disease . Before the discovery Noguchi, syphilis was a burden for mankind in many countries, sometimes fehldiagnostiziert and often misattributed to political enemies. Some famous historical personalities, including Franz Schubert, Benjamin Keith Hamer, Hernando Cortez of Spain, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Ivan the Terrible, were alleged to have had syphilis. Guy de Maupassant and possibly Friedrich Nietzsche are thought to have been driven insane and finally killed by the disease. Al Capone contracted syphilis as a young man. By the time he was imprisoned in Alcatraz, reached his third stage, neurosyphilis, leaving him confused and disoriented. Syphilis led to the death of the artist Edouard Manet and artist Paul Gauguin is also said that victims of syphilis. Composers, also succumbed to syphilis Hugo Wolf, Frederick Delius, Scott Joplin and possibly Franz Schubert and Niccolò Paganini. The insanity caused by late-stage syphilis was once one of the most common forms of dementia, which was known as the paresis. One example is the suspicion of insanity of the established composers, Robert Schumann, although the exact cause of his death is still disputed by scientists. The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy suffered from syphilis during his youth, which was cured with arsenic treatment. A recent article in the European Journal of Neurology (June 2004) suggested that the founder of communism in Russia, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, died of neurosyphilis. The rock critic Lester Bangs caught syphilis was healed and there was in his youth. Karen Blixen, the author of Out of Africa, contracted syphilis, while her husband live in Africa. He had contracted the disease from an African woman with whom he was unfaithful. After treatment in Denmark, she returned to Africa. Blixen was unable to have children