IT may be some grim comfort to know that infectious syphilis has increased not only in the United States but in many other countries as well. At home, reported cases of infectious syphilis reached their peak in 1947 and then began a precipitous decline, which lasted for almost a decade. Clinic and public-health physicians congratulated themselves and waited for syphilis to disappear, as smallpox had. Clinicians began to think of syphilis as an exotic disease, all but abandoned the routine use of the blood test and no longer taught courses on syphilis in the medical schools. Public-health medicine should have . . .