This is, for instance, the result of Erb’s experience, and Kisch speaks still more strongly in the same sense.  Bumm, again, although regarding gonorrhoea as one of the two chief causes of sterility in women, finds that it is not the most frequent cause, being only responsible for about one-third of the cases; the other two-thirds are due to developmental faults in the genital organs.  Dunning in America has reached results which are fairly concordant with Bumm’s.

With regard to another of the terrible results of gonorrhoea, the part it plays in producing life-long blindness from infection of the eyes at birth, there has long been no sort of doubt.  The Committee of the Ophthalmological Society in 1884, reported that thirty to forty-one per cent. of the inmates of four asylums for the blind in England owed their blindness to this cause.[232] In German asylums Reinhard found that thirty per cent. lost their sight from the same cause.  The total number of persons blind from gonorrhoeal infection from their mothers at birth is enormous.  The British Royal Commission on the Condition of the Blind estimated there were about seven thousand persons in the United Kingdom alone (or twenty-two per cent. of the blind persons in the country) who became blind as the result of this disease, and Mookerji stated in his address on Ophthalmalogy at the Indian Medical Congress of 1894 that in Bengal alone there were six hundred thousand totally blind beggars, forty per cent. of whom lost their sight at birth through maternal gonorrhoea; and this refers to the beggar class alone.

Although gonorrhoea is liable to produce many and various calamities,[233] there can be no doubt that the majority of gonorrhoeal persons escape either suffering or inflicting any very serious injury.  The special reason why gonorrhoea has become so peculiarly serious a scourge is its extreme prevalence.  It is difficult to estimate the proportion of men and women in the general population who have had gonorrhoea, and the estimates vary within wide limits.  They are often set too high.  Erb, of Heidelberg, anxious to disprove exaggerated estimates of the prevalence of gonorrhoea, went over the records of two thousand two hundred patients in his private practice (excluding all hospital patients) and found the proportion of those who had suffered from gonorrhoea was 48.5 per cent.

Among the working classes the disease is much less prevalent than among higher-class people.  In a Berlin Industrial Sick Club, 412 per 10,000 men and 69 per 10,000 women had gonorrhoea in a year; taking a series of years the Club showed a steady increase in the number of men, and decrease in the number of women, with venereal infection; this seems to indicate that the laboring classes are beginning to have intercourse more with prostitutes and less with respectable girls.[234] In America Wood Ruggles has given (as had Noggerath previously, for New York), the prevalence of gonorrhoea