+Quacks and Self-treatment.—­Hot Springs.+—­The temptation to take up quack forms of treatment or to treat himself without the advice of a physician besets the path of the syphilitic throughout the course of the disease; an enormous number of fraudulent enterprises thrive on the credulity of its victims.  Most of them are of the patent medicine specific type.  Others, however, have a tinge of respectability and are dangerous simply because they are insufficient and not carried out under proper direction.  Many popular superstitions as to the value of baths in syphilis and of the usefulness of a short course of rubs with bathing, or a “trip to the springs,” are of this kind.  Enough has been said in the foregoing chapters to make it plain to any one who is open to conviction that syphilis is no affair for the patient himself to attempt to treat.  The best judgment of the most skilled physicians is the least that the victim owes himself in his effort to get well.

+Patient and Physician.+—­For the same reasons every person who has or has had syphilis, cured or not, or has been exposed to it, should make it an absolute rule to inform his physician of the fact.  The recognition of many obscure conditions in medicine depends on this knowledge.  For a patient to falsify the facts or to ignore or conceal them is simply to work against his own interests and to hinder his physician in his efforts to benefit him.

Chapter XIV

Mental Attitudes in Their Relation to Syphilis

One’s way of looking at a thing has an immense influence on what one does about it.  Obvious as this principle is in the every-day affairs of life, it becomes still more obvious as one studies a disease and watches the way in which different individuals react to it.  The state of mind of a few people infected with a rare condition may not seem a matter of more than passing interest, but in a disease which is a wide-spread and disastrous influence in human life, the sum-total of our states of mind about it determines what we do against it and, to no small degree, what it does to us.  Syphilis as a medical problem offers comparatively few difficulties at the present day.  What blocks our progress now is largely an affair of mental attitudes, of prejudices, of fears, or shame, of ignorance, stupidity, or indifference.  Mental strain, a powerful influence in many diseases, is a factor in syphilis also, and the state of mind of the patient has often almost as much to do with the success of his treatment as has salvarsan or mercury.  For that reason it is worth while to devote a chapter to picturing in a general way the mental side of syphilis.