Maybe the blue ointment connection was that both syphlis and breech-loading were a "French Disease" :"...let me caution the whole world against using fire-arms that are opened and loaded at the breech-end — a horrid ancient invention, revived by foreign makers, that is dangerous in the extreme, and by which I have just heard (April 29th, 1844) of a man being killed by the very gun that I condemned when in Paris in 1841." (Lieutenant Colonel Peter Hawker "Instructions to Young Sportsmen in All That Relates to Guns and Shooting ", Ninth edition, 1844.)

Markus