Coitus per rectum sometimes conveys the disease to that region, and many well authenticated cases of rectal gonorrhoea have been reported, usually, but not always, from sodomy.
Winslow reports a case where a boy in a Baltimore institution contracted urethral gonorrhoea while out on leave, and by pederasty, or rectal coitus, spread the contagion to ten other boys, who consequently suffered from rectal gonorrhoea. J. A. Murray reports a case of gonorrhoea of the rectum where the innocent wife of an innocent husband contracted the disease by using in her bathroom a rectal syringe which had just before been used by a servant girl who confessed to having gonorrhoea for giving herself a vaginal injection. Many similar cases are recorded. Gonorrhoea of the rectum causes great pain, a constant desire to go to the closet, agonizing stools and painful urination, with purulent and bloody discharges from the rectum.
Etiology, or an Account of the Cause and Origin of Gonorrhoea. A widespread belief is prevalent, even among a large class of intelligent laymen, that gonorrhoea and syphilis are closely related; but the two diseases are entirely distinct.
The modern scientific impetus to medicine has forever put an end to all doubts regarding this.
In 1879 Neisser, of Breslau, discovered an organism, or micrococcus, which he found constantly and invariably in the pus discharge of gonorrhoea of the generative organs and gonorrhal conjunctivitis; this organism he named the "gonococcus", and scientists now call it the "gonococcus of Neisser".
Gonorrhoea is therefore distinctly proved to be a microbic disease, having for its sole cause this minute vegetable "gonococcus", just as phthisis has been proved to be due to the "tubercle bacillus", and as diphtheria, typhoid fever, erysipelas, anthrax, etc., are caused each by its own peculiar and distinctive organism.
The gonococcus is one of the largest of the vegetable micro organisms which cause disease, but nevertheless it is exceeding minute. The organism can be seen with a microscope which magnifies five hundred diameters, but it is more satisfactory to employ an oil immersion lens which has an amplification of from one thousand to twelve hundred diameters. When seen unstained it has a peculiar pearl like sheen, and a quick, rotatory motion, bufb in order to observe it satisfactorily, it is necessary, in addition to the high power magnification, to stain it with an aniline dye.
The organism measures 0.8 to 1.6 micromillimeters, or T.ITJ an inch. The gonococci are always found in pairs and are thence called "diplococci", and each diplococcus, or pair of organisms which are coupled together, resembles in shape a French roll, or coffee bean. Furthermore their "grouping" is characteristic, as they are never found in chains, but always in small clusters or clumps, and the number of the organisms is usually divisible by four.
As is well known to most persons, a minute quantity of yeast funguSj sacckaromyces cerevisice, added to dough, causes it to "leaven", or "rise", by fermentation, that effect being due to an enormous increase in the number of yeast cells within a short time; so also if a few gonococci are implanted on a mucous membrane, they rapidly multiply in a manner peculiar to these bacterial organisms by "cleaving" or dividing in a geometrical ratio into countless other "daughter" cells. All this would occur within a few hours time. Thus, one gonococcus cleaves into two; these again subdivide so as to form four; and these again further split up into eight, sixteen, thirty two, sixty four, and so on until countless thousands are soon propagated.