Chapter II

Syphilis as a Social Problem

The simple device of talking plain, matter-of-fact English about a thing has a value that we are growing to appreciate more and more every day.  It is only too easy for an undercurrent of ill to make headway under cover of a false name, a false silence, or misleading speech.  The fact that syphilis is a disease spread to a considerable extent by sexual relations too often forces us into an attitude of veiled insinuation about it, a mistaken delicacy which easily becomes prudish and insincere.  It is a direct move in favor of vulgar thinking to misname anything which involves the intimacies of life, or to do other than look it squarely in the eye, when necessity demands, without shuffling or equivocation.  On this principle it is worth while to meet the problem of a disease like syphilis with an open countenance and straightforward honesty of expression.  It puts firm ground under our feet to talk about it in the impersonal way in which we talk about colds and pneumonia and bunions and rheumatism, as unfortunate, but not necessarily indecent, facts in human experience.  Nothing in the past has done so much for the campaign against consumption as the unloosing of tongues.  There is only one way to understand syphilis, and that is to give it impartial, discriminating discussion as an issue which concerns the general health.  To color it up and hang it in a gallery of horrors, or to befog it with verbal turnings and twistings, are equally serious mistakes.  The simple facts of syphilis can appeal to intelligent men and women as worthy of their most serious attention, without either stunning or disgusting them.  It is in the unpretentious spirit of talking about a spade as a spade, and not as “an agricultural implement for the trituration of the soil,” that we should take stock of the situation and of the resources we can muster to meet it.

+The Confusion of the Problem of Syphilis with Other Issues.+—­Two points in our approach to the problem of syphilis are important at the outset.  The first of these is to separate our thought about syphilis from that of the other two diseases, gonorrhea, or “clap,” and chancroids, or “soft sores,” which are conventionally linked with it under the label of “venereal diseases."[2] The second is to separate the question of syphilis at least temporarily from our thought about morals, from the problem of prostitution, from the question as to whether continence is possible or desirable, whether a man should be true to one woman, whether women should be the victims of a double standard, and all the other complicated issues which we must in time confront.  Such a picking to pieces of the tangle is simply the method of scientific thought, and in this case, at least, has the advantage of making it possible to begin to do something, rather than saw the air with vain discussion.