em depends on the
class of patients considered. It is evident, though, that only a
relatively small proportion of the total number of syphilitics are
doomed to either of these fates. Taking the population as a whole, the
percentage of syphilitics who develop this form of late involvement
probably does not greatly exceed 1 per cent.

+Treatment and Prevention of Late Syphilis of the Nervous
System.+--Locomotor ataxia and paresis, even more than other syphilitic
diseases of the nervous system, are extremely hard to affect by
medicines circulating in the blood, and for that reason do not respond
to treatment with the ease that syphilis does in many other parts of the
body. Early locomotor ataxia can often be benefited or kept from getting
any worse by the proper treatment. For paresis, in our present state of
knowledge, nothing can be done once the disease passes its earliest
stages. In both these diseases only too often the physician is called
upon to lock the stable door after the horse is stolen. The problem of
what to do for the victims of these two conditions is the same as the
problem in other serious complications of syphilis--keep the disease
from ever reaching such a stage by recognizing every case early, and
treating it thoroughly from the very beginning.

SUMMARY

Summing up briefly the main points to bear in mind about the course of
syphilis--there is a time, at the very beginning of the disease, even
after the first sore appears, when the condition is still at or near the
place where it entered the body. At this time it can be permanently
cured by quick recognition and thorough treatment. There are no fixed
characteristics of the early stages of the disease, and it often escapes
attention entirely or is regarded as a trifle. The symptoms that follow
the spread of the disease over the body may be severe or mild, but they
seldom endanger life, and again often escape notice, leaving the victim
for some years a danger to other people from relapses about which he may
know nothing whatever. Serious syphilis is the late syphilis which
overtakes those whose earlier symptoms passed unrecognized or were
insufficiently treated. Late syphilis of the skin and bones, disfiguring
and horrible to look at, is less dangerous than the hidden syphilis of
the blood-vessels, the nerves, and the internal organs, which, under
cover of a whole skin and apparent health, maims and destroys its
victims. Locomotor ataxia and softenin