The Third Great Plague | Page 5

a whole, but sometimes destroying considerable
portions of the parts involved.
Let us think of syphilis, then, as a serious but by no means hopeless
constitutional disease. Dismiss chancroid as a relatively insignificant
local affair, seldom a serious problem under a physician's care.
Separate syphilis from gonorrhea for the reason that gonorrhea is a
problem in itself. Against its train of misfortune to innocence and guilt
alike, we are as yet not nearly so well equipped to secure results.
Against syphilis, the astonishing progress of our knowledge in the past
ten years has armed us for triumph. When the fight against tuberculosis
was brought to public attention, we were not half so well equipped to
down the disease as we are today to down syphilis. For syphilis we now
have reliable and practical methods of prevention, which have already
proved their worth. The most powerful and efficient of drugs is
available for the cure of the disease in its earlier stages, and early
recognition is made possible by methods whose reliability is among the
remarkable achievements of medicine. It is the sound opinion of
conservative men that if the knowledge now in the hands of the medical
profession could be put to wide-spread use, syphilis would dwindle in
two generations from the unenviable position of the third great plague
to the insignificance of malaria and yellow fever on the Isthmus of
Panama. The influences that stand between humanity and this
achievement are the lack of general public enlightenment on the disease
itself, and public confusion of the problem with other sex issues for

which no such clean-cut, satisfactory solution has been found. Think of
syphilis as the wages of sin, as well-earned disgrace, as filth, as the
badge of immorality, as a necessary defense against the loathesomeness
of promiscuity, as a fearful warning against prostitution, and our
advantage slips from us. The disease continues to spread wholesale
disaster and degeneration while we wrangle over issues that were old
when history began and are progressing with desperate slowness to a
solution probably many centuries distant. Think of syphilis as a
medical and a sanitary problem, and its last line of defense crumbles
before our attack. It can and should be blotted out.
+Syphilis, a Problem of Public Health Rather than of
Morals.+--Nothing that can be said about syphilis need make us forget
the importance of moral issues. The fact which so persistently distorts
our point of view, that it is so largely associated with our sexual life, is
probably a mere incident, biologically speaking, due in no small part to
the almost absurdly simple circumstance that the germ of the disease
cannot grow in the presence of air, and must therefore find refuge, in
most cases, in the cavities and inlets from the surface of the body.
History affords little support to the lingering belief that if syphilis is
done away with, licentiousness will overrun the world. Long before
syphilis appeared in Europe there was sexual immorality. In the five
centuries in which it has had free play over the civilized world, the
most optimistic cannot successfully maintain that it has materially
bettered conditions or acted as a check on loose morals, though its
relation to sexual intercourse has been known. As a morals policeman,
syphilis can be obliterated without material loss to the cause of sexual
self-restraint, and with nothing but gain to the human race.
It is easier to accept this point of view, that the stamping out of syphilis
will not affect our ability to grapple with moral problems, and that
there is nothing to be gained by refusing to do what can so easily be
done, when we appreciate the immense amount of innocent suffering
for which the disease is responsible. It must appeal to many as a
bigoted and narrow virtue, little better than vice itself, which can derive
any consolation in the thought that the sins of the fathers are being
visited upon the children, as it watches a half-blind, groping child feel

its way along a wall with one hand while it shields its face from the
sunlight with the other. There are better ways of paying the wages of
sin than this. Best of all, we can attack a sin at its source instead of at
its fulfilment. How much better to have kept the mother free from
syphilis by giving the father the benefit of our knowledge. The child
who reaped his sowing gained nothing morally, and lost its physical
heritage. Its mother lost her health and perhaps her self-respect. Neither
one contributes anything through syphilis to the uplifting of the race.
They are so much dead loss. To teach us to avoid such losses is the
legitimate field of preventive medicine.
On this simplified and practical basis, then, the remainder of this
discussion