Of all drugs used for VD before Ehrlich's time, only mercury for syphilis and silver nitrate to prevent gonococcal blindness in newborn babies can now be thought to have had any value. Of these, the second, introduced in the early 1880s by the Leipzig obstetrician Karl Siegmund Franz Crede following the work of Noeggerath, is still in use today. Mercury has gone the way of guaiac, of which nothing more need be said. Mercury probably never did more than relieve symptoms, although an ointment of calomel (mercurous chloride) rubbed into the genitals, proposed in the early 1900s following experiments with chimpanzees, seems to have had value as a prophylactic for syphilis. In 1949, as the crest of optimism in the penicillin era approached, Evan Thomas, an eminent New York syphilologist, said: “Antisyphilitic therapy with mercury, a protoplasmic poison, is practically obsolete. If mercury is used at all, the best method of administration is by inunction.”

Thomas Dover (1660 1742), an Englishman, still remembered for a powder mixture of ipecac and opium with milk sugar, came in later life to be nicknamed "Dr. Quicksilver" because of his advocacy of metallic mercury for syphilis and other things. He published a book on the subject in 1732, tracing the history of the therapeutic use of raw mercury back to Paracelsus. We have seen reason to believe that mercury, probably as one of its ores (like cinnabar), was used to treat syphilis much earlier, perhaps as far back as the time of the ancient Chinese. As for Dr. Dover, he had opponents even in his own time, among them Daniel Turner, who insisted that raw mercury was useless in the treatment of syphilis. (see CURE AND CURABILITY PART III)