=Infantile Blindness.--=So serious has the matter of infantile blindness become that some state boards of health and some city health departments supply all physicians and midwives with specially prepared packages containing cotton and nitrate of silver solution for preventive or curative treatment of the eyes of all new-born children. At the time of the first bath each eye is carefully washed with a separate pledget of cotton saturated with boric acid solution. Each then receives a drop of the silver solution, which is made just strong enough to kill any gonococci that might be present without itself inflaming the eye. Water used in bathing the baby's body of course is not allowed to come in contact with its eyes. Such treatment should be given every child no matter how unsuspicious the circumstances may be. German authorities who have been following this method now for some years assure us that nineteen-twentieths of the blindness of infancy can thus be prevented. =Syphilis.--=As to _syphilis_, another and even more terrible of these diseases, we have before us the absurd fact that while thousands upon thousands of dollars are being spent to establish a rigid inspection and preventive measures against the spread of a very similar disease in the horse, this malady in man is allowed to pass unchallenged and we are confronted by the gruesome certainty that there are hundreds of these diseased persons about us to-day who, on their mere affirmation that they are unmarried and of age, will be given the right to marry and thus produce families of infected children irrevocably doomed to early death or to lifelong misery. While syphilis is most commonly spread through relations between the sexes, it may be acquired in various other ways, as for example, through a cut in shaving with the same razor an infected individual has used. It is commonly transmitted from parent to child. Practically every prostitute is a center of dissemination. Katherine Bement Davis has shown in her studies made at the New York State Reformatory for Women that while ordinary clinical tests show that apparently only twenty-one per cent. of these women are infected with venereal disease, more careful laboratory tests showed at least ninety per cent. to be infected. Syphilis is caused by _Treponema pallidum_, a small unicellular animal parasite. Given access to the blood by any means whatever, possibly even through an abrasion in the lip by means of a kiss, it multiplies rapidly and any part or organ of the body may be attacked. Usually a small sore occurs at the point of entrance to the body, but often it heals up readily with little indication of the seriousness of the infection.