These poisonous drugs suppress the initial lesion and diffuse the disease poison through the system.  Nature takes up the work of elimination by means of skin eruptions and ulcers in various parts of the body, but these also are promptly suppressed with mercurial ointments and other alternatives.  This process of suppression is continued for months and years, until the organism is so thoroughly saturated with alterative poisons that vital force can no longer react by acute reactions against the original syphilitic poisons.  This state of vital paralysis is then called a cure.

The medical professor, however, knows better.  He instructs the students from the lecture platform:  “When, after two or three years of mercurial treatment, syphilitic symptoms cease to appear, you may permit the patient to marry—­but never guarantee a cure.”

Why not?  Because the professor is aware that the offspring of such a union are born with hereditary symptoms well known to every physician, and because the patient thus cured (?) may turn up in the doctor’s office at any time thereafter with a hole in his palate, ulcers on his body, caries of the bones or with other secondary and tertiary symptoms.

Mercury has an especial affinity for the bony structures.  It will work its way through the vertebrae of the spine and the bones of the skull into the nerve matter of the brain and spinal cord, causing inflammation, excruciating headaches, nervous symptoms, girdle pains, etc.  These stages of acute inflammation are followed in a few years by sclerosis (hardening) of nerve matter and blood vessels, resulting in paresis, locomotor ataxy or paralysis agitans.

Neither is it necessary to contract specific diseases in order to fall a victim to these dreadful conditions:  mercury, iodine and other destructive alternatives are given in a hundred different forms for a multitude of other ailments.

A few years ago we had under our care a patient in the last stages of locomotor ataxy, who for years had been suffering the tortures of the damned.  There had never been a taint of specific disease in her system, but four different times in her life she had been salivated by calomel (a common laxative containing mercury).  This dreadful poison was given to her in large doses for the cure of liver trouble and constipation.  She was only fourteen years old when, on account of this, she first suffered from acute mercurial poisoning.

Another patient who, after fifteen years of slow and torturous dying by inches, succumbed to the same disease, absorbed the mercurial poison in his boyhood days while attending a boarding school.  He was twice salivated by mercurial ointments applied to cure the itch (scabies), a disease which was epidemic at times among the boys.  He likewise never had a syphilitic disease.

A young man, insane at the age of thirty, absorbed the infernal poison when four years of age.  He had at the time a psoric skin eruption, but the family physician suspected syphilitic infection from the nurse girl and kept the child under mercury for six months.  How do we know that the diagnosis of syphilis was false?  Because the iris of the eye revealed “psora” as the cause of the suspicious eruption which reappeared several times later in life, and because the servant girl was afterwards absolutely exonerated by competent physicians.