The Phantom of the Opera has Syphilis
It explains almost everything.
Warning: This post will include pictures of human remains and descriptions of medical conditions. If these are offensive or disturbing to you, turn back now.
Also, spoilers for Phantom of the Opera musical and novel. But if you haven’t seen the musical by now … dude.
In every class wherein I have an excuse to do so I try to show pictures of advanced treponemal disease because a.) it is amazing and b.) there is no better way to convince young people to wrap it up when boning. Also, I really like grossing out eighteen-year-olds. They think they’re so cool. But anyways I only deal with these things in dry bone and theory so I don’t typically work with people who are both alive and have these diseases. And for that reason despite having an unhealthy and kind of unfathomable love for Phantom of the Opera, I didn’t until recently make the connection that Erik almost definitely has syphilis.
We’re going to do this right so first I want to lay out his symptoms and do some differential diagnosis.
