Two married persons, foreigners, whom I never knew, were attacked almost at the same time, with a running, accompanied with weakness, and with pains along the spine of the back. They were very sure there was no venereal taint in the case, and could impute their disorder to nothing but conjugal excesses. The running was much the most considerable in the husband. They had tried various remedies, and all without any effect, and among others some mercurial pills, which had increased the running. At length they had me consulted. I prescribed for them the cold-bath, wine medicated with the bark, steel, and flowers of red roses. They took regularly my prescription: it was the summer of 1758, when the rains rendered the use of bathing in the river very difficult: the wife bathed only once or twice, the husband a dozen of times. At five weeks end, they sent me word that they were almost totally restored: I advised them to continue the method till the cure should be completed, which it soon was. These happy successes cannot, however, serve for a general foundation of a favorable prognostic: this disorder is often extremely rebellious, and even sometimes incurable. Of this I will give but one example, but it is a demonstrative one. One of the greatest Practitioners that we have now in Europe, and who has enriched the medical art with works, all of them excellent, is actually himself afflicted with a _simple gonorrhœa_, of fifteen years standing, which not all his skill, nor that of some other Physicians, whom he has consulted, have been able to dissipate. This sad and vexatious disorder wastes him away, little by little, and gives room to fear the loss of him long before the term to which it were to be wished he should arrive, and to which he might attain in the ordinary course of nature. It would be needless for me to launch into a farther extension: I have aimed at omitting nothing that might open the eyes of youth on the horrors of the precipice they are preparing for themselves. I have done my best to point out the most proper means of remedying the evils they will have brought on themselves: I conclude with a repetition of what I have already said in the course of this work, that some happy cures ought not to serve for an encouragement of fallacious hopes; those who are even the most happily cured, find it a hard matter to recover their pristine vigor, nor can preserve a transitory health but by dint of a constant attention to regularity, and to the keeping measures with their constitution; the number of those who never emerge out of a state of languor, is tenfold to that of those who are cured; and some examples of persons, who either had not been more than slightly affected, or in whom a more than ordinary vigorous constitution might occasion the easier recovery, ought not to be considered as constituting a general rule, ——_Non bene ripæ_ _Creditur: ipse aries etiam nunc vellera siccat._ _The_ END. FOOTNOTES