All 20 Uses of
syphilis
in
Cutting for Stone
- At least your syphilis isn't far advanced because you can feel testicular pain, huh?†
Part 1 *syphilis = a sexually transmitted disease that, if treated early, can be completely cured with antibiotics
- Anyway, as students we had to squeeze the testes to check for intact visceral pain, because diseases like syphilis can cause the loss of visceral pain sensations.†
Part 1
- One day, at the bedside of a patient with syphilis, the professor picked on me to demonstrate visceral pain.†
Part 1
- The patient had advanced syphilis.†
Part 1
- But the consequences of such tolerance were evident to her: tubal and ovarian abscesses, infertility from gonorrhea, stillbirths, and babies with congenital syphilis.†
Part 1
- So young, and already with scars of healed syphilis?†
Part 2
- Venereum insontium—"innocently acquired" syphilis—was still in the textbooks, though Ghosh didn't believe in such a thing.†
Part 2
- Other than congenital syphilis where the mother infected the unborn child, he believed that all syphilis was sexually acquired.†
Part 2
- Other than congenital syphilis where the mother infected the unborn child, he believed that all syphilis was sexually acquired.†
Part 2
- If I remember correctly, I got Harris to fund a project that was your idea: a citywide campaign against gonorrhea and syphilis.†
Part 2
- It was against her conscience to hold back money when money allowed her to cure trachoma and to prevent blindness, or give penicillin and cure syphilis—the list was endless.†
Part 2
- In the Piazza he had once pointed out the stigmata of congenital syphilis in a listless boy who was squatting on the sidewalk: "Saddle nose, cloudy eyes, peg-shaped incisor teeth ...."†
Part 3
- I read about the other stigmata of syphilis: mulberry molars, saber-shinned tibias, and deafness.†
Part 3
- I had a vision of the Middle Passage, of blacks shuffling down the gangplank, shackles clinking while a hundred pairs of eyes probed their flanks, their biceps, and studied the exposed flesh for yaws, which was the Old World syphilis.†
Part 4
- His father's stamping, crashing gait, always worse at night when he no longer could see where his feet were planted—that was from syphilis of the spinal cord, or tabes dorsalis.†
Part 4
- The meandering conversation, the boastful tales at the dinner table, the delusions of grandeur—that was syphilis of the brain, not just the spinal cord.†
Part 4
- He'd been spared congenital syphilis.†
Part 4
- But then he realized that his fear was absurd because congenital syphilis had to come through the placenta to him, it had to come from his mother.†
Part 4
- Tuberculosis didn't cause aneurysms like the one that killed her, but syphilis did.†
Part 4
- She might have recovered from her TB, but she probably never knew she had syphilis until that aneurysm blossomed and began eroding painfully through the breastbone when she was at the sanatorium.†
Part 4