Since the nerve centre which presides over the sexual functions is situated in the spinal cord, these various disorders often produce spinal affections, such as partial or complete paralysis of certain groups of muscles, or hyperesthesia and extreme excitability of the muscles.
"The general condition always remains good, the appearance and nutrition may be excellent. Nevertheless the patients are usually in a deplorable state. The impotence and pollutions depress the mind, the various sensations rouse the belief in some serious disease which is concealed by the physician, the mood is gloomy and hypochondriacal. This is especially true when the nervous disturbances spread farther, and other spinal symptoms are added.
These include the various manifestations of spinal irritation, pressure and pain in the back, formication, cold or heat along the spine, radiating neuralgias and paralgias, particularly in the lumbo sacral plexus. The neurasthenic symptoms may also spread farther.
Digestion then suffers, symptoms of gastric and intestinal catarrh set in, but are only the result of atony. These reduce the patient, and bis condition is thus aggravated materially. The nervous symptoms become more severe. There is general depression, pressure in the head, mental obtuseness, palpitation of the heart, etc.
The unstable vasomotor system causes rapidly changing color, pallor and redness, especially in the face. Digestion is poor, the local symptoms in the domain of the uropoietic and sexual organs attain considerable intensity no wonder that not a few of these patients terminate their existence by suicide".
Tlie Degree of Infectiousness of Chronic Gonorrhoea. For the ex-gonorrhceal patient who is contemplating marriage, and for the married man who has broken the pledge of fidelity and constancy implied in his solemn marriage vow, and has become infected, it is exceedingly important that they shall distinctly understand that they are, in all seriousness, venomous and poisonous and deadly to whatever woman they approach in the sexual relation, until pronounced safe by a skilled specialist, and that many of them never can be cured.
Death does not follow in their path at once, but countless numbers of innocent women pay for their husbands dirty and illegitimate practices with their shipwrecked health and life.
Unlike the cobra's and the rattlesnake's bite, the immediate results of infection are not usually seen to be dangerous to life; but gonorrhoea is characterized by an indefinitely long period of convalescence, so that wives and children will suffer terrible consequences, even years afterward, unless the patient be no longer a gonococcus bearing animal.
Only the physician who is skilled in the modern methods of microscopical research can decide when the patient is no longer a menace to society, and the opinion of no other is of the least value. As mentioned heretofore, the discharge of chronic gonorrhoea may appear at the meatus in the form of a mere drop of pus, hardly noticeable, or it may come from the posterior urethra and not show at all, externally, on account of the backward gravitation of the discharge toward the bladder.
In this latter and by far more usual event the recognition of the disease can be made only by microscopical demonstration of pus-corpuscles and clap-shreds in the urine a trained eye of course being necessary to distinguish them from other objects in the field of vision.
Without exception the gonococci can always be found in a case of acute gonorrhoea, but by no means always in chronic gonorrhoea. The finding of gonococci in chronic gonorrhoea of course makes the diagnosis sure, but the failure to find them on the first examination does not at all exclude the possibility of their presence.
Pus corpuscles and clap-shreds may be seen day after day with the microscope in a case of chronic gonorrhoea, and no gonococci appear along with them; then, after any debauch or excess on the part of the patient, they may exuberate and come out from their lurking places in the deep recesses and crypts of the urethra and its accessory canals, and reappear in considerable numbers.