Virologists

Virologists, the name of a school of physicians whose head was the famous Parisian doctor Ricord. By his massive vaccinations in 1837, he proved the difference between gonorrhea and syphilis, but he fell into another error. He and his school taught that gonorrhea is in general not an infectious disease, that this is a simple catarrh of the mucous membrane, which may occur from various causes, for example, from menstrual blood, from sharp food, from abuse of wine, from sexual excesses, etc. According to the teaching of the Virologists, sexual intercourse even with an innocent girl or with the most virtuous woman can cause gonorrheal urethritis. Thus, the Virologists denied the specificity of the gonococcal infection. Despite the proofs of a number of authors, the Virologists, in the ranks of whom were such authorities as Lan-glebert in Germany, Fournier and Jullien in France, Tarnovsky in Russia, stubbornly stood on that point of view that gonorrheal urethritis is in no way different from other inflammatory diseases of the mucous membranes. This dispute, which split the venereologists of that time into two hostile camps, gave rise to extensive polemical literature and was concluded only in 1879, after the discovery by Neisser of the specific causative agent of gonorrhea—the gonococcus (see).