Syphilis is a constitutional disease, affecting in one way or another the whole body.  For that reason, measures directed to improving the general health and maintaining the resistance of the patient at the highest point have an important place in the management of the disease.  By his habits and mode of life a person with syphilis does much to help or hinder his cure, and to protect or endanger those around him.  For that reason a statement of general principles may well be drawn up to indicate what is desirable in these regards.

+A Well-balanced Life.+—­First, for his own sake, a syphilitic should live a well-balanced and simple life so far as possible.  In this disease the organs and structures of the body which are subject to greatest strain are the ones most likely to suffer the serious effects of the disease.  Worry and anxiety, excessive mental work, long hours without proper rest, strain the nervous system and predispose it to attack.  Excessive physical work, fatigue, exhaustion, poor food, bad air, exposure, injure the bodily resistance.  Excesses of any kind are as injurious as deprivation.  In fact, it is the dissipated, the high livers, who go to the ground with the disease even quicker than those who have to pinch.

+Alcohol.+—­Alcohol in any form, in particular, has been shown by extensive experience, especially since the study of the nervous system in syphilis has been carried to a fine point, to have an especially dangerous effect on the syphilitic.  Alcohol damages not only the nervous system, but also the blood vessels, and makes an unrivaled combination in favor of early syphilitic apoplexy, general paresis, and locomotor ataxia.  A syphilitic who drinks at all is a bad risk, busily engaged in throwing away his chances of cure.  Even mild alcoholic beverages are undesirable and the patient should lose no time in dropping them entirely.

+Tobacco.+—­Tobacco has a special place reserved for it as an unfavorable influence on the course of syphilis.  It is dangerous to others for a syphilitic to smoke or chew because, more than any other one thing, it causes the recurrence of contagious patches in the mouth.  It is remarkable how selfish many syphilitic men are on this point.  In spite of the most positive representations, they will keep on smoking.  Not a few of them pay for their selfishness with their lives.  These mucous patches in the mouth, often called “smoker’s patches,” predispose the person who develops them to one of the most dangerous forms of cancer, which is especially likely to develop on tissues, like those of the mouth and tongue, which have been the seat of these sores.