STI Treatments Throughout History
By: Maya Keefer
Sexually Transmitted Infections have been around since the time of Ancient Greece and with them have come a variety of treatments: often ineffective, excruciating, ludicrous, and occasionally deadly. STI outbreaks and their treatments can be traced through time from a Herpes outbreak under the ancient Roman ruler Tiberius that resulted in a city-wide ban on kissing and attempted cauterization of Herpes sores with a hot iron, to the use of colloidal silver, silver nitrate, arsenic, antimony, bismuth and gold to treat Gonorrhea in the 1800s.
Mercury Treatment
Syphilis appeared in Europe in around 1495 and quickly became one of the leading causes of death. As citizens struggled with Syphilis symptoms, doctors scrambled to create treatments. Ultimately the primary treatment for Syphilis became Mercury in the 1600s and remained so into the early 20th century. Mercury would be repeatedly administered through inhalation in steam baths, liquid mercury injections, as a salve rubbed onto skin, and through oral consumption. ‘Blue Mass’ pills were used from the 17th to the 19th century, and they used Mercury in its elemental or compound form, usually mercurous chloride which was called Calomel. Side effects of Mercury treatment included mercurial erethism (aka depression, sadness, and something described as “extreme sighing”), tremors of the limbs, rotting jaws, facial holes, tongue and gum ulcerations, and often death. Although Mercury was the primary treatment, Arsenic was similarly utilized, and was drunk, applied to the skin, used in enemas, injected, inhaled, and eaten. Arsenic’s side effects included, among other things, vomiting, diarrhea, cancer, and death. Often the treatment of Mercury and occasionally Arsenic killed the patient long before syphilis would have.
Blue Mass Pills
Syphilis symptoms are often mild in the beginning and tend to change and come and go over time. Additionally, there is a phase before tertiary (late) syphilis called latent syphilis in which the symptoms tend to disappear completely. When this natural pause in symptoms coincided with the administration of an attempted cure, doctors would claim their treatment was effective. This unfortunate process resulted in over 300 years of Mercury being used as the main treatment, as well as other creative treatments like gold injections and emetics (substances that cause vomiting) like Antimony. Many in society considered venereal diseases (STIs) a divine punishment for sin and this moral dilemma contributed to the extremely harsh punishments and treatments that were delivered.
The first effective treatment for Syphilis, Salvarson, wasn’t discovered until 1910 by Paul Ehrlich and Sahachrio Hata, five years after the discovery of the causative bacterium Treponema Palliudm. Salvarsan and Neosalvarson were utilized until Penicillin was proven to be more effective against Syphilis in the 1940s. Yay for science!