Reform in this field, Isidore Dyer declares, must emblazon on its flag the motto, “Knowledge is Health,” as well of mind as of body, for women as well as for men.  In a discussion introduced by Denslow Lewis at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in 1901 on the limitation of venereal diseases (Medico-Legal Journal, June and September, 1903), there was a fairly general agreement among all the speakers that almost or quite the chief method of prevention lay in education, the education of women as much as of men.  “Education lies at the bottom of the whole thing,” declared one speaker (Seneca Egbert, of Philadelphia), “and we will never gain much headway until every young man, and every young woman, even before she falls in love and becomes engaged, knows what these diseases are, and what it will mean if she marries a man who has contracted them.”  “Educate father and mother, and they will educate their sons and daughters,” exclaims Egbert Grandin, more especially in regard to gonorrhoea (Medical Record, May 26, 1906); “I lay stress on the daughter because she becomes the chief sufferer from inoculation, and it is her right to know that she should protect herself against the gonorrhoeic as well as against the alcoholic.”

We must fully face the fact that it is the woman herself who must be accounted responsible, as much as a man, for securing the right conditions of a marriage she proposes to enter into.  In practice, at the outset, that responsibility may no doubt be in part delegated to parents or guardians.  It is unreasonable that any false delicacy should be felt about this matter on either side.  Questions of money and of income are discussed before marriage, and as public opinion grows sounder none will question the necessity of discussing the still more serious question of health, alike that of the prospective bridegroom and of the bride.  An incalculable amount of disease and marital unhappiness would be prevented if before an engagement was finally concluded each party placed himself or herself in the hands of a physician and authorized him to report to the other party.  Such a report would extend far beyond venereal disease.  If its necessity became generally recognized it would put an end to much fraud which now takes place when entering the marriage bond.  It constantly happens at present that one party or the other conceals the existence of some serious disease or disability which is speedily discovered after marriage, sometimes with a painful and alarming shock—­as when a man discovers his wife in an epileptic fit on the wedding night—­and always with the bitter and abiding sense of having been duped.  There can be no reasonable doubt that such concealment is an adequate cause of divorce.  Sir Thomas More doubtless sought to guard against such frauds when he ordained in his Utopia that each party should before marriage be shown naked to the other.  The quaint ceremony he describes was based on a reasonable idea, for it is ludicrous, if it were not often tragic in its results, that any person should be asked to undertake to embrace for life a person whom he or she has not so much as seen.