History
While retrospective studies have found earlier instances of what may have been the same disorder, the first clearly identified examples of paresis among the insane were described in Paris after the Napoleonic Wars. General paresis of the insane was first described as a distinct disease in 1822 by Antoine Laurent Jesse Bayle. General paresis most often struck people (men far more frequently than women) between twenty and forty years of age. By 1877, for example, the superintendent of an asylum for men in New York reported that in his institution this disorder accounted for more than twelve percent of the admissions and more than two percent of the deaths.
Originally, the cause was believed to be an inherent weakness of character or constitution. While Esmarch and Jessen had asserted as early as 1857 that syphilis caused general paresis, progress toward the general acceptance by the medical community of this idea was only accomplished later by the eminent nineteenth-century syphilographer Alfred Fournier (1832–1914). In 1913 all doubt about the syphilitic nature of paresis was finally eliminated when Noguchi and Moore demonstrated the syphilitic spirochaetes in the brains of paretics.
In 1917 Julius Wagner-Jauregg discovered that infecting paretic patients with malaria could halt the progression of general paresis. He won a Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1927. After World War II the use of penicillin to treat syphilis made general paresis a rarity: even patients manifesting early symptoms of actual general paresis were capable of full recovery with a course of penicillin. The disorder is now virtually unknown outside developing countries, and even there the epidemiology is substantially reduced.
In her 1915 novel, The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather referred to the insanity of the wife of a main character as having been caused by general paresis but there is no hint that the character had contracted syphilis. In her 1953 novel, A Pocket Full of Rye, Agatha Christie used paresis as an explanation for the behavior of the victim. She did not mention the syphilitic connection.
Read more about this topic: General Paresis Of The Insane
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)