thing, the penalty of the sin of the flesh, a sort of shameful evil branded by Catholic malediction, but an ordinary disease which may be treated and cured.”  It may be remarked that the aversion to acknowledge venereal disease is at least as marked in France as in any other country; “maladies honteuses” is a consecrated French term, just as “loathsome disease” is in English; “in the hospital,” says Landret, “it requires much trouble to obtain an avowal of gonorrhoea, and we may esteem ourselves happy if the patient acknowledges the fact of having had syphilis.”

No evils can be combated until they are recognized, simply and frankly, and honestly discussed.  It is a significant and even symbolic fact that the bacteria of disease rarely flourish when they are open to the free currents of pure air.  Obscurity, disguise, concealment furnish the best conditions for their vigor and diffusion, and these favoring conditions we have for centuries past accorded to venereal diseases.  It was not always so, as indeed the survival of the word ‘venereal’ itself in this connection, with its reference to a goddess, alone suffices to show.  Even the name “syphilis” itself, taken from a romantic poem in which Fracastorus sought a mythological origin for the disease, bears witness to the same fact.  The romantic attitude is indeed as much out of date as that of hypocritical and shamefaced obscurantism.  We need to face these diseases in the same simple, direct, and courageous way which has already been adopted successfully in the ease of smallpox, a disease which, of old, men thought analogous to syphilis and which was indeed once almost as terrible in its ravages.

At this point, however, we encounter those who say that it is unnecessary to show any sort of recognition of venereal diseases, and immoral to do anything that might seem to involve indulgence to those who suffer from such diseases; they have got what they deserve and may well be left to perish.  Those who take this attitude place themselves so far outside the pale of civilization—­to say nothing of morality or religion—­that they might well be disregarded.  The progress of the race, the development of humanity, in fact and in feeling, has consisted in the elimination of an attitude which it is an insult to primitive peoples to term savage.  Yet it is an attitude which should not be ignored for it still carries weight with many who are too weak to withstand those who juggle with fine moral phrases.  I have even seen in a medical quarter the statement that venereal disease cannot be put on the same level with other infectious diseases because it is “the result of voluntary action.”  But all the diseases, indeed all the accidents and misfortunes of suffering human beings, are equally the involuntary results of voluntary actions.  The man who is run over in crossing the street, the family poisoned by unwholesome food, the mother who catches the disease of the child she is nursing, all