Note 271 — THIRD SECTION. Relation of the Physician to Diseases consequent upon the Use or Misuse of the Genital Organs.

Oppenheim, Ueber den Zustand der Heilkunde in der Türkei, (On the Condition of of Medical Knowledge in Turkey), p. 81., “Without the very great cleanliness of the Turks, who after every occasion of sexual intercourse not only wash carefully, but also wherever it is possible go to the bath likewise, the disease would undoubtedly be yet more widely spread than it is.... Yet the Turk will never admit, or rather he simply cannot bring himself to conceive, that he has contracted an infection through unclean cohabitation, but will be found always to give some other cause as occasioning his sickness. In fact the language itself shows this; the Turkish expression for gonorrhœa is “Belzouk”, literally: chill of the back (from bel, back and zouk, cold), and chill or overheating will always be represented as having brought it on.”—Moreover Zeller von Zellenberg, Abh. über die ersten Erscheinungen venerischer Lokal-Krankheitsformen und deren Behandlung, (Dissertation on the earliest Appearances of Forms of Local Venereal Disease, and their Treatment), Vienna 1810., p. 7., is of the opinion, that the reason of the imperfect knowledge possessed by the Ancients of gonorrhœa, chancre and buboes is to be found in this delayed appearance of the symptoms of disease after coition.