Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease, or STD, caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Common symptoms of the disease include painful urination and genital discharge. There are records of historical discussions of gonorrhea in ancient civilizations and during the Middle Ages, but scientists did not begin investigating the scientific causes and treatments of the STD until the sixteenth century. In the 1700s, physicians attributed gonorrhea to the same cause as another STD, syphilis. Later, in the 1800s, researchers discovered the two diseases were not the same and identified the bacteria N. gonorrhoeae that causes gonorrhea. By the 1900s, researchers began using antibiotics to target the bacteria, but many drugs eventually developed antibiotic resistance. In 2020, the World Health Organization, or WHO, estimated that 82.4 million individuals contracted gonorrhea globally, and as of 2024, researchers continue to experiment with various antibiotic drugs to provide adequate treatment for the disease.

Philippe Ricord was a nineteenth-century physician and surgeon in France who studied syphilis and demonstrated that it is different from gonorrhea. As of 2024, researchers recognize that syphilis and gonorrhea are both sexually transmitted infections, or STIs. However, the bacterium Treponema pallidum causes syphilis, leading to symptoms such as sores and fever, whereas the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae causes gonorrhea and leads to different symptoms such as discharge from the urethra. Before Ricord, researchers thought syphilis and gonorrhea were the same disease. Ricord, through observation and experimentation, distinguished syphilis from gonorrhea and arranged the stages of syphilis into primary, secondary, and tertiary, each associated with different symptoms and levels of severity. By distinguishing syphilis from other STDs and accurately categorizing its stages, Ricord helped researchers better understand how to treat syphilis, a disease that can be transmitted from mother to child, causing life-threatening illness in infants.