The Origin and Spread of Dementia Paralytica

Abstract

Dementia paralytica is a declining disease. Deaths due to it in England and Wales were first recorded by the Registrar General in 1901 and since that year, when the number was 2,272, the annual figure has fallen steadily until in 1957 it was only 68. Moreover, there is evidence (adduced below) that not more than a small part of this decline can be attributed to improvements in medical treatment. The fear that there might be a recrudescence of dementia paralytica as a result of the spread of syphilis during the second world war has not so far been realized and it seems likely that what is now, in Great Britain at all events, an obsolescent disease will soon become a rarity. Yet there are many unsolved problems in its history. We do not know, for example, why the alleged references to this striking disease were so few and so inadequate until the third decade of the nineteenth century. We do not know why its recognition in many countries was so tardy in spite of the clear description given by the French alienists. Nor do we know why the disease, which at the start of the nineteenth century seems to have been predominantly one of males, has gradually—and at different rates in different countries—become much more evenly distributed between the sexes.