In 1803 Captain Meriweather Lewis of the US Army led a platoon sized army unit up the Missouri River, over the Rocky Mountains and into the Columbia River basin. As preparation he had gotten some training in therapeutics with the father of American medicine, Dr.Benjamin Rush. Lewis treated gonorrhea and boils on the east side of the Rocky Mountains and added syphilis on the west side where the Indian maidens had been more exposed to the British.. One and two thirds centuries later I was pulled out of a residency and turned into a flight surgeon (as happened to Dr Ron Paul.) I was sent to Vietnam where I treated gonorrhea and little else. Day after day I faced seven to ten twenty year old draftees from my 1000 man Air Cavalry Squadron complaining of “the drip.” Most had gonorrhea, commonly called “clap.” This has an incubation period of two or three days and so the youngsters were still post coital. They were euphoric, puffed up and often quite proud of their peccadillo. A small minority had chlamydia, “the strain,” which has an incubation period of 5 to 7 days. These fellows were more troubled as the connection of the urethral discharge with sex was less clear. We needed enormous doses of penicillin for the clap.
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