An error in diagnosis gave me the incentive for reviewing this subject. I bad occasion to observe a patient for a period of one and a half years. He had what I considered to be fairly typical symptoms of gallstones, whereas the operation showed that the clinical picture was due to multiple gummata of the liver. The general literature of this topic gave me the impression that the keenest clinicians frequently failed to suspect the syphilitic process in the liver since it mimics, as Arthur R. Edwards1 puts it, a great many diseases of the liver and gall-bladder.
HISTORY
Syphilitic jaundice was known as far back as Paracelsus, Matthiolus and François de la Boë Sylvius. French writers, among them Lancereaux,2 Cornil and Mauriac, have emphasized the relationship between icterus and syphilis. Werlhof (1732), J. Frank (1821), and Yvarres (1854) had a knowledge of fever in lues. Guntz