cians impress upon these
patients two injunctions: first that they shall take the known remedies
for the disease one or two months in every year, and second that they
shall confide to every physician whom they may consult for any chronic
or obscure ailment, the fact that they have been infected with
syphilis. This latter injunction is especially important; for nearly all
disorders produced by syphilis can be promptly checked by certain
remedies; yet many of these disorders affecting internal organs of the
body, may not be identified as of syphilitic origin by the unsuspecting
physician, who therefore fails to administer the needed and successful
remedy. By directing the doctor's attention to the possible syphilitic
origin of the disease through a frank confession of his early infection,
the patient may save his health or even his life.

These serious and intractable results of syphilis appearing years after
its contraction, occur especially in the shape of disorders of the
blood-vessels and of the nervous system--apoplexy, paralysis, insanity
and locomotor ataxia for example; and these but too often appear after
the man has acquired a family that is dependent upon him for support.
The mental state of the husband and father whose bread-winning capacity
is suddenly abolished through the natural result of his early folly, may
be imagined.

That the syphilitic parent may transmit the disease to his offspring is
common knowledge; some of his children are destroyed by the inherited
disease before birth; others are born to a brief and sickly span of
life; others attain maturity, seriously handicapped in the race of life
by a burden of ill-health, incapacity and misery produced by the
inherited taint; while still others apparently escape these evil
effects.

Absolute freedom from venereal contagion, admittedly a prequisite for
marriage, must be determined by expert medical skill; apparent recovery
does not prove that the disease is really eradicated. Ignorance of the
difference between real and apparent cure is responsible for most of the
venereal infection of brides and taint of children.

The present popular crusade against tuberculosis is laudable and must
result in a distinct restriction of the "great white plague"; but the
greater black plague, syphilis, could be virtually eradicated in a few
generations, through the universal practice of circumcision. Although
apparently introduced into Europe less than four centuries