General Medical Services in England
Arthur Newsholme in International Studies Volume 3, 2015
Ruled to be within the doctor's obligations:— Fracture of leg,Curetting of uterus,Reduction of dislocated elbow under an anæsthetic.Removal of needle from foot.Taking blood for Wassermann test.Vaccination.
Chronic infectious diseases
Christopher Aldous, Akihito Suzuki in Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan, 1945–52, 2011
As happened so often with the Occupation, the reality on the ground militated against the aspirations embodied in the new law. Rather like in the case of tuberculosis, the reports of PH&W officials from the field narrate a tale of slow, fitful progress. While they alluded to satisfactory levels of expertise, they frequently highlighted inadequate resources. Starting with the issue of diagnosis, the observations of Elkins and Nieda suggest that in this area at least, procedures were perhaps not as ‘archaic’ as generally implied. Time and again they refer to sero-logical or blood serum tests for syphilis, commonly Murata or Ide tests, which generally passed muster. This was evidenced by the PH&W weekly bulletin for 2–8 May 1949, which revealed that quality checks by US Army 406th General Laboratory indicated that the Murata, Ide and Hokken (or Kitasato) tests, all obviously of Japanese derivation, were satisfactory but were more sensitive than the US Kahn test and so produced more false positive reactions. As a result, it was recommended that they be used as screening tests and positive or doubtful reactions should be confirmed by the more rigorous Wassermann test, originally developed in 1906.
‘A masculine mythology suppressing and distorting all the facts’
Waltraud Ernst in Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal, 2006
The growing concern over the public health threat posed by venereal diseases by the end of the nineteenth century, made yet more acute by the revelation of the Wasserman test of the hitherto unsuspected prevalence of asymptomatic syphilis in the population, provided further stimulus and opportunity for women to attack the social institutions that facilitated the spread of these incurable diseases. Michael Worboys has plausibly argued that as a result not only of the rise of bacteriological science in the late nineteenth century, but also of the feminist arguments about the pernicious societal effects of male promiscuity, gonorrhoea was, by the beginning of the twentieth century, re-gendered as a disease spread by men. Formerly it had been assumed to be conveyed to men from women, probably by some toxic natural secretion of the vagina. But by the 1900s it was a disease contracted by immoral men and conveyed to their innocent wives, causing hidden disease and sterility.18
Thyroid gland involvement in secondary syphilis: a case report
Published in Acta Clinica Belgica, 2022
Thomas Strypens, Gudrun Alliet, Greet Roef, Linsey Winne
The involvement of the thyroid gland during a syphilis infection is rare [8,9] and was first described in 1908 [10]. Thyroid gland involvement is more common in women than in men [8,9]. Though thyroid gland involvement is rare, as many as 50% of cases of secondary syphilis in women were reported to be associated with painful swelling of the thyroid gland [10]. The lesions were described as firm, painless, gummatous or sclerous, mostly unilateral, lesions with a rare occurrence of ulceration or myxedema [10]. Fever, pain, pharyngitis, erythema or local inflammation were not mentioned, but symptoms of local compression were common [10]. Thyroid dysfunction has been reported with hypothyroidism in congenital syphilis and hyperthyroidism in both congenital and acquired syphilis [10]. Most of these cases date back to the early twentieth century before the widespread use of antibiotics and often lack histological or microbiological evidence for micro-organism invasion [10]. Diagnosis was often based on histologic examination, response to non-antibiotic, antisyphilitic therapy or a positive Wassermann reaction, which may have led to an erroneous estimation of thyroid gland involvement in syphilis. The Wassermann test is not specific to syphilis and may produce a positive reaction to other infectious diseases, malignancies and even pregnancy [11]. In our case, the swelling of the thyroid caused complaints of local compression; dyspnea, difficulty to swallow and talk, and hoarseness were present. Besides tachycardia, there were no suggestive symptoms of hyperthyroidism. Diagnosis was made using real-time PCR where DNA was manually extracted from the fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) aspirate and the primer set-up was based on a case report by Chen et al. [12].
Related Knowledge Centers
- Antibody
- Cardiolipin
- Cerebrospinal Fluid
- Complement Fixation Test
- Rapid Plasma Reagin
- Venereal Disease Research Laboratory Test
- Blood
- Syphilis
- NONtreponemal Tests For Syphilis
- Premarital Medical Examination