=The Seriousness of the Situation.--=Unfortunately the insidious nature of gonorrheal infections is unknown to most persons. A cure is apparently effected, yet as a matter of fact the germs may live for years and, if in the male, later be transmitted to the wife, subjecting her to a future of invalidism and misery. Reliable statistics from various medical authorities reveal the appalling fact that seventy-five per cent. or more of the surgical operations for inflammatory pelvic disorders peculiar to women, such as pus tubes and peritonitis, are attributable to this disease, as is also the involuntary sterility of forty-five per cent. of childless women. Unwelcome as the fact is there is an abundance of evidence to show that a large percentage of men in particular have at some period of their life been infected with venereal disease. Of our fourteen million males in the United States under the age of thirty we find estimates by some specialists in venereal diseases to the effect that five million of them, that is, one out of three, suffer from some one of the social diseases or their consequences. Doctor Hugh Cabot, one of the chief surgeons of the Massachusetts General Hospital at Boston, a member of the faculty of the Harvard Medical School and president of the American Association of Genito-Urinary Surgeons, has this to say about the situation: "We have of late years heard much about the frequency and serious consequences of tuberculosis; it has been dubbed the 'white plague,' and so active has been the campaign that a wide-spread understanding of this serious disease has resulted. It may safely be averred that in the urban population at least there are two, and perhaps three, individuals with syphilis to every one with tuberculosis. The frequency of gonococcus infection is much higher." He believes that over half the male population acquire a gonococcus infection at some period of their career. While as a layman, one can not but feel that a specialist's estimate may run unduly high because of the fact that he is encountering an inordinate proportion of such maladies every day, still such specialists are in position to get at the truth as no other person can and their calculations are probably not grossly in error. In any event any one who has progressed in worldly knowledge beyond the naïveté of a child must recognize the appalling prevalence of these maladies.