Nicolas Robles
Badajoz, Spain

Philippe Ricord was born on December 10, 1800 in Baltimore, Maryland. His father had escaped from Marseille during the French Revolution in 1790, but returned to France in 1820. Ricord studied under Guillaume Dupuytren at Hôtel Dieu but fell out with him after publishing that a surgical procedure that Dupuytren claimed to have invented was already in use in America. He transferred to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where he graduated in medicine in 1826. He specialized in venereal diseases and became surgeon-in-chief to the Hôpital des Vénériens (later Hôpital du Midi) and Hôpital Cochin, at the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, Paris.

He developed urologic treatments, including Ricord’s formula for the treatment of urethritis, which won the Montyon Prize in 1842. He described the different stages of syphilis as we currently understand them. His meticulous observation and the introduction of the speculum in 1833 made possible the full differentiation of syphilis from condyloma acuminata, balanoposthitis, and gonorrhea (chancroid). After Ricord’s work on the two types of chancres, his disciples Basserau and Clerc completed his work in 1852, differentiating soft chancre (chancroid) from active syphilis. For years, syphilis and gonorrhea had been confused, and many believed that they were the same disease, especially after John Hunter’s ill-fated experiment. (Hunter inoculated himself with the discharge obtained from a patient believed to have gonorrhea and instead developed syphilis, later dying of an aortic aneurysm.)

Gaetano Donizetti caught the Great Pox during his student days in Bologna. His exaggerated libido was so well-known that he was called “Maestro Orgasmo.” The first symptoms of his venereal disease appeared in 1828 at age thirty-one, and over the next decade, the symptoms of syphilis ended his career. A letter sent to his brother-in-law on August 9, 1845, said that he had been examined by Philippe Ricord and two other doctors. They recommended mustard plasters, footbaths, boiled Leopard’s Bane (a potentially poisonous plant), and application of twelve perianal leeches. It did little to halt the progression of his disease. In 1846, Donizetti died at the age of fifty, and an autopsy confirmed cerebrospinal syphilis. Despite advances in the clinical definition of venereal diseases, effective treatments for them were still far from available.

Throughout his life, Philippe Ricord received many honors. From October 26, 1869, he was surgeon to Napoleon III, and during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War (1870), he organized a health service composed of more than 300 doctors and medical students. For this reason, he was appointed Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1881. He was also a Member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine de France. He died in 1889 and his remains rest in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise in Paris.