eat wrong done to do a little right. What if there are a
few who deserve what they got? We may well ask ourselves how free we are
to cast the first stone. And why single out syphilis as the badge of
venery? The "itch" is transmitted by sexual relations too. Why not make
the itch a sign of shame? The power that has done the damage is not the
intrinsic viciousness of syphilis, but the survival of the old idea of
sexual taboo, the feeling that sex is a secret, shameful thing,
essentially unclean. To this age-old myth some one added the idea of
punishment, and brutalized our conception of syphilis for centuries. If
there were a semblance of crude, stern justice in accepting syphilis as
the divinely established punishment for sexual wrong-doing, protest
would lose half its meaning. Not only does syphilis fail to punish
justly, but there is also something savage, akin almost to the mental
attitude that makes "frightfulness" possible in war, in the belief that
it is necessary to make headway against a sexual enemy by torturing,
ruining, and dismembering men, women, and children, putting out the eyes
of the boy who made a slip through bad companionship and mutilating the
girl who loved "not wisely but too well." Only innocence pays the
spiritual price of syphilis. The very ones whose punishment it should be
are the most indifferent to it, and the least influenced by fear of it
in their pursuit of sexual gratification. I always recall with a shock
the utterance of a university professor in the days when salvarsan was
expected to cure syphilis at a single dose. He rated it as a catastrophe
that any such drug should have been discovered, because he felt that it
would remove a great barrier to promiscuous relations between men and
women--the fear of venereal disease. This is the point of view that
perpetuates the disease among us. It is this attitude of mind that
maintains an atmosphere of disgrace and secrecy and shame about a great
problem in public health and muddles our every attempt to solve it.
Those who feel syphilis to be an instrument adapted to warfare against
sexual mistakes, and are prepared to concede "frightfulness" to be
honorable warfare, will, of course, fold their hands and smugly roll
their eyes as they repeat the words of the secretary of a London Lock
hospital, "I don't believe in making it safe."[14]

[14] Quoted by Flexner in "Prostitution in Europe."

+Syphilis as a "Disgrace" and a "Moral Force."+--If s