By: nikky Howard
Submitted: 2010-06-25 03:46:54 | Word Count: 651
The STD epidemic is not limited to nowadays's youth - oh no. Some STDs (and their painful, scientifically dubious treatments) date back many lots of years. Let's have a look at some of the older ones and the myths regarding them that caused some pretty unorthodox treatments throughout the history of STDs:
Herpes
Herpes has been around since ancient Greek times - of course, we owe the Greeks for the name, that roughly means that "to creep or crawl" - presumably a reference to the unfold of skin lesions. Although native STD testing wasn't out there until long after the virus was identified in 1919, early civilisations could see that it was a real drawback - the Roman emperor Tiberius introduced a ban on kissing at public events to try and curb the spread. Not a lot of is understood about early attempts to treat the disease, but be grateful you weren't around throughout the physician Celsus' experimental section: he advocated that the sores be cauterised with a hot iron!
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The matter actually never went away - Shakespeare said herpes as "blister plagues", implying the extent of the epidemic. One common belief at the time was that the disease was caused by insect bites, that seems like a clear explanation given the sores that the sexually transmitted disease creates.
Syphilis
Mercury was the remedy of selection for syphilis in the center ages - the understanding of the sexually transmitted disease's routes and this treatment gave birth to the expression: "A night within the arms of Venus results in a lifetime on Mercury". This was administered orally or via direct contact with the skin, though one of the foremost unlikely strategies concerned fumigation, where the patient was placed in a very closed box with only their head poking out. The box contained mercury and a fire was started beneath it inflicting it to vaporise. It wasn't vastly effective, but was very, very uncomfortable. Because Syphilis sores have a tendency to fade on their own after a while, many people believed they were cured by just concerning any remedy within the STD's history!
As the sexually transmitted disease became better understood, the flexibility to cure it increased. In 1908, the arsenic based drug Salvarsan was developed and, whereas not a hundred% effective, was a massive step forward. Its lack of effectiveness within the tertiary phase of the STD led to another disease being employed as a cure: malaria. Because it appeared that those with high fevers might be cured of syphilis, malaria was used to induce an initial fever, which was thought of an appropriate risk as a result of malaria may be treated with quinine. Penicillin eventually confined each these treatments to STD history.
Gonnorhea
Before the times of local STD testing, Gonnorhea was usually mistaken for Syphilis, as without a microscope, the two had terribly similar symptoms and were typically silent. Of course, if you were "diagnosed" with the disease, you were in for an unfortunate treatment. Consistent with some, the syringes found aboard the Mary Rose was designed to inject liquid mercury down the urethra of an crew plagued by the disease. By the 19th century, silver nitrate was a widely used drug, later to be replaced by Protargol. A colloidal silver replaced this, and was widely used until antibiotics came to the rescue in the 1940s.
Therefore if you think that that native STD testing and treatment could be a painful process now, offer a thought to the poor people who had mercury or arsenic treatment all those years ago - and thank God for antibiotics!
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Nikky has been writing articles online for nearly 2 years now. Not only does this author specialize in Diseases STDs , you can also check out his latest website about:
