through ignorant and unintelligent use.  This opinion is shared by European as well as American authorities.  Administered under the direction of a physician, the Metchnikoff prophylaxis of syphilis would undoubtedly be at its best in the prevention of the disease.  For these reasons, as well as to prevent the spread of the knowledge to those who would be damaged by it, those interested are referred to their physicians for a description of the method.  Any one having the benefit of it should be able to convince his medical advisor that there is good reason why this kind of professional knowledge should be brought to bear on his case.  The ordinary methods of preventing infection by washes and similar applications used by the “knowing ones” are most of them worthless or greatly inferior to the Metchnikoff prophylaxis.  They are, moreover, a positive source of danger because of the false sense of security which they create.  If every person who has run the risk of contracting syphilis should visit his physician at once to receive prophylactic treatment, the effect on syphilis at large would probably be as good as in the army and navy.  There would still be opportunity on such occasions to bring moral forces and influence to bear on those who would respond to them.  There can be no object in withholding such knowledge from those who are confirmed in their irregular sexual habits.  At the same time there could be few better influences thrown across the path of one just starting on a wrong track than that exerted by a physician of skill and character, to whom the individual had appealed to avert the possible disastrous result of an indiscretion.

Chapter XVI

Public Effort Against Syphilis

+The World-wide Movement Against Venereal Disease.+—­This chapter is intended to give some account of the great movements now begun to control syphilis and its fellow-diseases throughout the world.  A campaign of publicity was the starting-point of the organized attempt to control tuberculosis, and in the same way a similar campaign has been at the bottom of movements which now, under the pressure of the tremendous necessities of war, are making headway at a pace that generations of talking and thinking in peaceful times could not have brought about.  Although this country at the present writing is probably farther in the rear than any other great nation of the world in its efforts to control the venereal diseases as a national problem, it is fortunate in having had the way paved for it by epoch-making movements such as those of the Scandinavian countries, and by the studies of the Sydenham Royal Commission on whose findings the British Government is now undertaking the greatest single movement against syphilis and gonorrhea that has ever been launched.  For many years Germany has had a society whose roll includes some of the greatest names in modern science, directing all its energy toward the solution of the