Alfred Fournier, 1832-1914. His influence on venereology.

It is now almost a hundred years since Fournier, much against the standard belief of the times, proposed that syphilis was the likely cause of tabes dorsalis. Alfred Fournier (Fig. 1) was unquestionably the foremost syphilologist in France in the last 30 years of the 19th century, but his life and works are little known in English-speaking countries, probably because so few of his works have been translated into English (Fournier, 1906) and because he is overshadowed on this side of the Channel by his contemporary Jonathan Hutchinson (1828-1913).