These affections are uninfluenced by specific treatment with either mercury or iodides. They are divided into organic affections that are well characterized anatomically, and functional disturbances of widely different kinds without any demonstrable anatomical ground.
Hallopeau has recently proposed the term "syphilitic deuteropa thies" for these changes. Tommasoli and La Alensa designate as "syph ilismus" the constitutional disturbances in the offspring caused by the depraved generative cells of syphilitic individuals.
If individuals who present genuine manifestations of syphilis in earliest period of life, show evidence of parasyphilitic diseases later in life, this is not hard to understand and is not to be distinguished from the corresponding conditions present in acquired syphilis. And yet many authors consider that parasyphilitic symptoms may appear in infancy and childhood as the sole manifestation of syphilitic influence upon the offspring from an infected ancestor, without such children having ever shown genuine virulent manifestations of syphilis. This influence they think may extend even to the third and fourth genera tions (grandchild and greatgrandchild).
Among the parasyphilitic manifestations the following are the most important : amemic and atrophic conditions, failure to gain in weight and to develop properly, as well as foetal cachexia. A depraved condi tion of the generative cells of the parent due to the action of the syphi litic toxin is held responsible for these conditions, much as in the off spring of a tainted parent we see the effects of alcoholism, tuberculosis, saturnism, mercurialism, nicotism, etc. And yet there is little real evidence in favor of such an influence, since one can always assume or ganic changes in any part of the body during fatal life and one can think of these dystrophic conditions as resulting from them. Finger's im portant hypothesis that makes a distinction between purely toxicogenic and bacteriogenic syphilitic manifestations explains the general inferior ity of the tissues of hereditary syphilitic children as a result of the action of toxins.
A further division into meta- and parasyphilitic affections is fre quently made. In the first class would belong anatomically well char acterized organic changes, that have a syphilitic base, such as, especially, the changes in the central nervous system (Alobitts): tabes, dementia paralytica, hydrocephalus, cerebral paralysis of childhood, etc.; to which others would add also spastic hemiplegia and diplegia. In the second class would belong the general disturbances of development of the heredosyphilitic, among which one would consider diabetes mellitus and insipidus, as well as the hmoglobinuria of hereditary-syphilitic children.
It is not necessary to assume a harmful parasyphilitic protoplasmic change to explain the constitutional disturbances that occur during the eruptive period of early hereditary syphilis and that are characterized by pallor and stationary weight. Severely affected, atrophic, syphilitic children are never free from visceral and osseous manifestations, so that the cachexia in these cases can be directly attributed to the functional disturbance of organs that are important to life. The irritation of the bone marrow which is never absent, and which is characterized by the pouring out into the blood of characteristic leucocytes (myelocytic .anaemia) is also of significance in this connection. It has, therefore, by no means been proven that the high mortality of hereditary-syphilitic infants is due to any peculiar tissue inferiority. Still, the influence of finial syphilitic inflammatory processes on the one hand, and the dis turbances of blood formation and the septic secondary infections on the other, sufficiently explain, in themselves, the high mortality of syphilitic children.