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No one suggested that my growing social anxiety, my persistent nightmares or my general paralysis in life might have been due to grief.

Bazar, for example, cites the symptoms of late stage syphilis, or what was then understood as “general paralysis of the insane.”

Termed general paralysis of the insane, it was widely supposed by early practitioners to be caused by bad heredity, ‘weak character’ or moral turpitude.

That changed in 1913, when Japanese bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi, working at Rockefeller University in New York City, found traces of Treponema pallidum — the spiral-shaped bacterium responsible for syphilis — in the brains of deceased people with general paralysis.

Meanwhile, the discovery that general paralysis was a symptom of a sexually transmitted disease galvanized subsequent generations of psychiatrists.