Syphilis of the nervous system and its treatment is a subject of such magnitude and universal importance that it can not be satisfactorily dealt with in a brief discourse. My remarks will therefore be confined more particularly to intracranial syphilis, this being the commonest type of the disease with which we have to deal.
Syphilis is one of the most frequent infectious causes of organic nervous disease. Hence, in every patient who appears with symptoms of disease affecting the nervous system, we must ascertain, if possible, whether he has ever contracted syphilis. This is comparatively difficult with women patients. In every doubtful case we are forced to depend on the existence or non-existence of somatic signs of the disease, the collateral symptomatology, and the character and course of the nervous manifestations. When it is discovered that syphilis has been acquired at some more or less remote period, it does not