The Third Great Plague | Page 5

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 will proceed. Syphilis is a preventable disease, usually curable when handled in time, and its successful management will depend in large part upon the co?peration, not only of those who are victims of it, but of those who are not. It is much more controllable than tuberculosis, against which we are waging a war of increasing effectiveness, and its stamping out will rid humanity of an even greater curse. To know about syphilis is in no sense incompatible with clean living or thinking, and insofar as its removal from the world will rid us of a revolting