+Genital and Non-genital Syphilis in Lax Individuals.+—­The prevalence of syphilis among women who receive promiscuous attentions is enormous.  It is practically an axiom that no woman who is lax in her relations with men is safe from the danger of the disease, or can long remain free from it.  The type of man who is a Light o’ Love does not go far before he meets the partner who has been infected by some one else.  Becoming infected himself, he passes on his infection to his next partner.  Syphilis is not so often transmitted in prostitution, open or secret, as gonorrhea, but it is sufficiently so to make the odds overwhelmingly against even the knowing ones who hope to indulge and yet escape.  The acquiring of syphilis from loose men or women is usually thought of as entirely an affair of genital contacts.  Yet it is notable that extra-genital chancres are the not uncommon result of liberties taken with light women which do not go to the extent of sexual relation.  Women who accept intimacies of men who, while unwilling to commit an outright breach of decency, will take liberties with a woman who will accept them have only themselves to blame if it suddenly develops that the infection has been transmitted from one to the other by kisses or other supposedly mild offenses against the proprieties.

+Syphilis Among Prostitutes.+—­As to the prevalence of syphilis among both public and clandestine or secret prostitutes, several notable surveys of more or less typical conditions have been made.  With the aid of the Wassermann test much heretofore undiscovered syphilis has been revealed.  Eighty to 85 per cent of prostitutes at some time in their careers acquire the disease.[13] About half this number are likely to have active evidence of the disease.  Thirty per cent of the prostitutes investigated by Papee in Lemberg were in the most dangerous period—­the first to the third year of the disease.  Three-fourths of these dangerous cases were in women under twenty-five years of age—­in the most attractive period of their lives.  Averaging a number of large European cities, it was found that not more than 40 per cent of prostitutes were even free of the outward signs of syphilis, to say nothing of what laboratory tests might have revealed.  It is more than evident that prostitution is admirably fitted to play the leading role in the dissemination of this disease.  The young and attractive prostitute, whether in a house of ill-fame, on the street, or in the more secret and private highways and by-ways of illicit sexual life, is the one who attracts the largest number with the most certain prospect of infecting them.