The disease affects approximately 7% of individuals infected with syphilis, and is far more common in developing countries where fewer options for timely treatment are available.

Progressively, with the discovery of organic arsenicals such as Salvarsan and Neosalvarsan (1910s), the development of pyrotherapy (1920s), and the widespread availability and use of penicillin in the treatment of syphilis (1940s), the condition was rendered avoidable and curable.

Typical symptoms include loss of social inhibitions, asocial behavior, gradual impairment of judgment, concentration and short-term memory, euphoria, mania, depression, or apathy.

These delusions include ideas of great wealth, immortality, thousands of lovers, unfathomable power, apocalypsis, nihilism, self-guilt, self-blame, or bizarre hypochondriacal complaints.

Later, the patient experiences dysarthria, intention tremors, hyperreflexia, myoclonic jerks, confusion, seizures and severe muscular deterioration.

Although there were recorded cases of remission of the symptoms, especially if they had not passed beyond the stage of psychosis, these individuals almost invariably experienced relapse within a few months to a few years.

While retrospective studies have found earlier instances of what may have been the same disorder, the first clearly identified examples of paresis among the insane were described in Paris after the Napoleonic Wars.