ase. Why, look at zymotic diseases alone!"

"Exactly!" Beth answered. "Zymotic diseases alone! But why draw the
line there? And what are you doing to improve the race, to strengthen
its power to resist disease? You talk about Nature when it suits you;
but it is the cant of the subject you employ, for you are at variance
with Nature. Your whole endeavour is to thwart her. Nature decrees the
survival of the fittest; you exercise your skill to preserve the
unfittest, and stop there--at the beginning of your responsibilities,
as it seems to me. Let the unfit who are with us live, and save them
from suffering when you can, by all means; but take pains to prevent
the appearance of any more of them. By the reproduction of the unfit,
the strength, the beauty, the morality of the race is undermined, and
with them its best chances of happiness. Yes, you certainly do your
best to stamp out measles, smallpox, scarlet fever, and all that
group--diseases that do not necessarily leave any permanent mark on
the constitution; but at the same time you connive at the spread of
the worst disease to which we are liable. About that you preserve the
strictest professional secrecy. Only to-day, in the _Times_, there is
the report of a discussion on the subject at a meeting of the
International Congress of Legal Medicine--where is it?" She took up
the paper and read:--"'There was an important debate on the spread of
an infamous disease by wet nurses. This question is all the more
urgent because, though the greatest dangers and complications are
involved, _it is very generally neglected_.... When a doctor knows
that the parents of a child are tainted, should he so far disregard
the professional secrecy to which he is bound as to warn the nurse of
her danger in suckling the child?' Apparently not! The poor woman must
take her chance, as the child's unfortunate mother had to do when she
married."

"Ah, now you see for yourself, and will become reasonable, it is to be
hoped," he interrupted, rubbing his hands complacently; "for it is
precisely in order to check that particular disease that appointments
like mine are made."

"It is precisely in order to make vice safe for men that such
appointments are made," she answered. "Medical etiquette would not
stop where it does, at the degradation of those unfortunate women, if
you were honestly attempting to put a stop to that disease. You would
have it reported, irrespective of the sex of the sufferer,