General paresis
A disease caused by the syphilis organism entering the brain. Mental symptoms such as memory loss and delusions advance together with bodily ones such as slurred speech and tremor.
Many patients in nineteenth-century asylums had this disease, and they died about two to three years after it began. In England and Wales it accounted for about 8 percent of asylum admissions in the 1890s[1].
In 1822 the French physician Antoine Bayle argued that the paralysis and the mental disorder were signs of one and the same disease[2]. The link with syphilis was disputed for a long time, until in 1913 Hideyo Noguchi and J. W. Moore found the syphilis organism in the brains of twelve out of seventy patients who had died, which confirmed the cause[3].
It was the first major case in which the cause of a mental illness was found in the body.
Related terms
- SyphilisAn infection caused by a spiral-shaped bacterium, Treponema pallidum. It spreads mainly by sex and, after many years, can attack the brain and nerves.
- Cerebrospinal fluidThe clear fluid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. A small sample can give clues to diseases of the brain and nerves.
- Dementia praecoxA diagnosis put together by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in his 1899 textbook. The name means an early loss of mental powers: an illness that starts young and wears the mind down. It was later renamed schizophrenia.
Sources
- R. S. Stewart, “Decrease of General Paralysis of the Insane in England and Wales,” Journal of Mental Science 47(196), 41–48 (1901).
- G. M. Robertson, “The Discovery of General Paralysis,” Journal of Mental Science 69(284), 1 ff. (1923).
- H. Noguchi, J. W. Moore, “A Demonstration of Treponema pallidum in the Brain in Cases of General Paralysis,” Journal of Experimental Medicine 17(2), 232–238 (1913).