'He sees syphilis everywhere': Late Syphilis

Since the time of Ricord it has been customary to divide the “syphilis drama” into three stages. Nowadays the signs of tertiary syphilis rarely appear less than two years from the original infection, but in earlier times some of these seem to have appeared well before this; indeed, a “galloping syphilis” was described in which tertiary lesions followed the secondary stage after only a few months. This makes it more than usually difficult to interpret many of the early clinical descriptions, in particular to decide whether the authors were describing late syphilis or merely a prolonged secondary stage.