Babes In The Jungle

Montague Silver, the finest street man and art grafter in the West, says to me once in Little Rock: "If you ever lose your mind, Billy, and get too old to do honest swindling among grown men, go to New York. In the West a sucker is born every minute; but in New York they appear in chunks of roe - you can't count 'em!"
Two years afterward I found that I couldn't remember the names of the Russian admirals, and I noticed some gray hairs over my left ear; so I knew the time had arrived for me to take Silver's advice.
I struck New York about noon one day, and took a walk up Broadway. And I run against Silver himself, all encompassed up in a spacious kind of haberdashery, leaning against a hotel and rubbing the half-moons on his nails with a silk handkerchief.
"Paresis or superannuated?" I asks him.

A hundred years ago, the nation's mental hospitals each
had quite a few pathetic cases of the end results of
syphilis.

General paresis is a disorder characterized primarily by impaired mental function caused by damage to the brain from untreated syphilis. It is now extremely uncommon.
Causes, incidence, and risk factors
General paresis is one form of neurosyphilis, which is a manifestation of a late, untreated syphilis infection. It is a progressive, life-threatening complication.



The infection causes widespread damage to the nerves of the brain. This damage results in personality changes, mood changes, hyperactive reflexes, pain ("lightning pains," brief sharp pains in all parts that are characteristic of tabes dorsalis), eye changes with abnormal pupil response, abnormal mental function including hallucinations and delusions, decreased intellectual functioning (memory, calculating, judgment, insight), and speech changes.