The Sailors' (syphilis detecting) Handshake

It may be an apocryphal tale, but here's an interesting story about how sailors of yore determined if a potential suitor had syphilis.

As demonstrated by Victoria Bond and myself, Victoria is feeling my right elbow whilst shaking my hand. The epitrochlear lymph nodes in the elbow get swollen with syphilis.

The story goes that when sailors arrived in a new port, they would greet the girls in this manner to determine if they had syphilis. Another story goes that they did this whilst dancing. Whatever the case, it is true that the nodes swell when suffering from syphilis, although it's not fail safe as there are a number of things that could cause the swelling, including infection.

We made the following short video demonstration of the handshake when recording Diffusion Science Radio. The movie was produced by Ian Woolf. You can download the video as an mp4 here and find all my videos on youtube here.