The saying was, “A night in the arms of Venus and a lifetime with Mercury.”
The pre-antibiotic regimen for syphilis treatment was a year of mercury rubbings on the stomach, combined with neoarsphenamine injections: at least on the surface, a protocol similar to today's treatments of cancer with radiation and chemo. In fact, the Tuskegee syphilis study debacle began, not as a means of seeing how black males could be kept syphilitic (which is what it later morphed into, sadly), but how to get illiterate, thoroughly uneducated black males to be willing to commit to a year-long mercury/neoarsphenamine regimen.