intercourse, and also from the doctors as well as the mothers of syphilitic infants who have infected the foster-mothers they were entrusted to.  Although the French Penal Code forbids in general the disclosure of professional secrets, it is the duty of the medical practitioner to warn the foster-mother in such a case of the danger she is incurring, but without naming the disease; if he neglects to give this warning he may be held liable.

In England, as well as in the United States, the law is more unsatisfactory and more helpless, in relation to this class of offences, than it is in France.  The mischievous and barbarous notion, already dealt with, according to which venereal disease is the result of illicit intercourse and should be tolerated as a just visitation of God, seems still to flourish in these countries with fatal persistency.  In England the communication of venereal disease by illicit intercourse is not an actionable wrong if the act of intercourse has been voluntary, even although there has been wilful and intentional concealment of the disease. Ex turpi causa non oritur actio, it is sententiously said; for there is much dormitative virtue in a Latin maxim.  No legal offence has still been committed if a husband contaminates his wife, or a wife her husband.[249] The “freedom” enjoyed in this matter by England and the United States is well illustrated by an American case quoted by Dr. Isidore Dyer, of New Orleans, in his report to the Brussels Conference on the Prevention of Venereal Diseases, in 1899:  “A patient with primary syphilis refused even charitable treatment and carried a book wherein she kept the number of men she had inoculated.  When I first saw her she declared the number had reached two hundred and nineteen and that she would not be treated until she had had revenge on five hundred men.”  In a community where the most elementary rules of justice prevailed facilities would exist to enable this woman to obtain damages from the man who had injured her or even to secure his conviction to a term of imprisonment.  In obtaining some indemnity for the wrong done her, and securing the “revenge” she craved, she would at the same time have conferred a benefit on society.  She is shut out from any action against the one person who injured her; but as a sort of compensation she is allowed to become a radiating focus of disease, to shorten many lives, to cause many deaths, to pile up incalculable damages; and in so doing she is to-day perfectly within her legal rights.  A community which encourages this state of things is not only immoral but stupid.