Excerpt from Syphilis in Its Medical, Medico-Legal and Sociological Aspects
Contagious diseases, as a menace to the individual by their method of spreading, and as a menace to the race by their transmitted hereditary taint, offer an interesting field of study to the physician. The physician, more than anyone else, must try to prevent their spreading, and must enlighten the people concerning their existence and their consequences, so that the necessary precautions may be taken to protect society. Syphilis, as an infectious and contagious disease, which is communicated to the healthy by inoculation, and is transmitted by heredity to the fetus, either kills the fetus in utero, or causes the child to come into the world a tainted creature, demands our attention as a subject for study of deepest interest.
The connection between syphilis and social relations is so little understood that the name of the disease alone is sufficient to cast a mark of dishonor on the man who has had the misfortune to be inoculated. The public in general, ignorant of causation, is unable to understand the difference between one innocently infected and one who exposes himself to infection through lack of morality. Indeed, we shall never expect to be understood by superstitious people who, with religious devotion, carry about a potato in their hip pocket, which they believe will absorb all their rheumatic humors, or by those who carry pieces of carbon left by the are lights for the same superstitious purpose. Neither do we expect to be understood by those who, on account of their belief in occult virtues, wear an iron ring on their little finger, which they claim to be electric and able to cure them of all their rheumatic pains which may be the result of a gouty condition, or perhaps of an old neglected syphilis.
Whoever entertains such irrational views and such disproportionate hopes, is superstitious and incapable of realizing that when a man has an eruption on his face, although it may be of a syphilitic nature, the fault of the infection docs not necessarily rest on the lack of morality of the person. A great many, ignorant of the manifestations of any disease of the skin, are likely to think any eruption on the face or on the hands the result of syphilis.
It is for this reason we have decided to publish a few sociological considerations on this dreadful disease, for the purpose of placing the man who is infected with syphilis in a true social light.
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