moment’s hesitation as to whether the patient can afford it or not.  It is not too much to urge that private patent rights should not be allowed to control the price and distribution of such a commodity to the public.  Upon the payment of suitable royalties to the inventor the manufacture of such a drug should be thrown open to properly supervised competition, as in the case of diphtheria antitoxin, or be taken over by the Government and distributed at cost, at least to hospitals.  To bring about such a revision of our patent law every thinking man and woman may well devote a share of personal energy and influence.

The manner of giving salvarsan is as important for the patient as the correct performance of an operation, and the safeguards which surround it are essentially the same.  The drug is an extremely powerful one, more powerful than any other known, and in the usual doses it carries with it into the body for the destruction of the germs of syphilis many times the amount of arsenic needed to kill a human being.  If something should go astray, the patient might lose his life as promptly as if the surgeon or the anesthetist should make a slip during an operation.  To make the giving of salvarsan safe, the judgment, experience, and training of the specialist are not too much to ask.

The dangers of salvarsan are easily exaggerated, and some people have a foolish fear of it.  The wonderful thing about the drug is that, with all the possibility for harm that one might expect in it, it so seldom makes any trouble.  It is, of course, first carefully tested on animals when it is manufactured, so that no poisonous product is placed on the market.  It is as safe to take salvarsan at the hands of an expert as it is to take ether for an operation or to take antitoxin for diphtheria, and that is saying a good deal.  Most of the stories of accidents that go the rounds among laymen date back to the days when first doses were too large and made the patients rather sick for a time.  Present methods and cautions about administering the drug are such that, except for the improvement in their condition, patients seldom know they have received it.  The first dose may light the eruption up a little, but this is only because the drug stirs the germs up before it kills them, and improvement begins promptly within a few hours or a day or two.

The first characteristic of salvarsan which we should bear in mind especially, in our interest in the social aspects of syphilis, is then the rapidity rather than the thoroughness of its action.  It is a social asset to us because it protects us from the infected person, and it is an asset to the patient because it will set him on his feet, able to work and go about his business, in a fraction of the time that mercury can do it.