Syphilis in the Civil War

[Warpy]

7. I had a grand aunt who was given her dose by her returning hero

after WWI. When penicillin came out, she was treated and missed all the lesions eating into her bones but it left her goofy. Now that side family was always nuts, even by Irish standards, so no one else ever seemed to notice, not even when she made herself a nun's habit (and one for her daughter) and started to wander the streets of Albany with beads and bible in hand.

I later had a patient, a little old lady who'd probably gotten it from her conquering hero after WWII and not known what it was and so was never treated. Paresis put her into a permanent happy drunk. We had to talk her into treatment, she was terrified to lose the high.

I have to wonder what the streets were like in the bad old days during the period of giddiness before horrific, deep, and putrid sores that must have been a hideously painful way to go started to appear.

At least now the Native Americans are off the hook. They have found the typical lesions in skeletons at Pompeii and in a hospice burial at a monastery in England.