general paralysis

noun

Pathology.

1. a syphilitic brain disorder characterized by chronic inflammation and degeneration of cerebral tissue resulting in mental and physical deterioration.

Word History and Origins

Origin of general paralysis¹

First recorded in 1890–95

Example Sentences

No one suggested that my growing social anxiety, my persistent nightmares or my general paralysis in life might have been due to grief.

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Bazar, for example, cites the symptoms of late stage syphilis, or what was then understood as “general paralysis of the insane.”

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Termed general paralysis of the insane, it was widely supposed by early practitioners to be caused by bad heredity, ‘weak character’ or moral turpitude.

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That changed in 1913, when Japanese bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi, working at Rockefeller University in New York City, found traces of Treponema pallidum — the spiral-shaped bacterium responsible for syphilis — in the brains of deceased people with general paralysis.

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Meanwhile, the discovery that general paralysis was a symptom of a sexually transmitted disease galvanized subsequent generations of psychiatrists.

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