The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Third Great Plague, by John H. Stokes

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Title: The Third Great Plague
A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People

Author: John H. Stokes

Release Date: May 6, 2006 [EBook #18324]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Third Great Plague

A Discussion of Syphilis
for Everyday People

By

John H. Stokes, A.B., M.D.

Chief of the Section of Dermatology and Syphilology
The Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota

Assistant Professor of Medicine
The Mayo Foundation Graduate School of the University
of Minnesota

Philadelphia and London
W. B. Saunders Company
1920

Published, November, 1917

Copyright, 1917, by W. B. Saunders Company

Reprinted July, 1918

Reprinted February, 1920

PRINTED IN AMERICA

PREFACE

The struggle of man against his unseen and silent enemies, the lower or
bacterial forms of life, once one becomes alive to it, has an
irresistible fascination. More dramatic than any novel, more sombre and
terrifying than a battle fought in the dark, would be the intimate
picture of the battle of our bodies against the hosts of disease. If we
could see with the eye of the microscope and feel and hear with the
delicacy of chemical and physical interactions between atoms, the heat
and intensity and the savage relentlessness of that battle would blot
out all perception of anything but itself. Just as there are sounds we
cannot hear, and light we cannot see, so there is a world of small
things, living in us and around us, which sways our destiny and carries
astray the best laid schemes of our wills and personalities. The gradual
development of an awareness, a realization of the power of this world of
minute things, has been the index of progress in the bodily well-being
of the human race through the centuries marking the rebi