‘Four or five years afterward this youth goes to the marriage bed suffering, unknowingly, from a low grade of very slight latent urethritis, the sorrowful memento of that fatal night, which has existed behind an old stricture, and a result is effected for the avoidance of which he would most gladly have given all his earthly possessions. ‘All this sounds like poetry, not prose; like romance, not cold reality. But there is not a physician in this room who does not know, and who will not at once admit, that every word that I have uttered is beyond all question true, and even free from exaggeration. ‘I mentioned, in speaking of the grave duties demanded by puberty, that one of the important functions of the physician in regard to the development of the girl during the thirteen years which precede it, is to instruct her and her guardians how to prepare her for the approaching issue. In language no less strong I would here insist upon the physician’s duty to instruct men in all stations of life as to the importance of a “clean bill of health” in reference to gonorrhœa, both acute and chronic, before the marriage contract be entered upon. ‘Until a very late period the plan universally followed has been this: The man about to be married went to his physician, told him the history of a gonorrhœa, and asked if, now that all discharge appeared to have ceased, any danger would attend his consummating the tie. The physician would ask a few questions, examine the virile organ carefully as to discharge, and, if the “outside of the platter” appeared clean, give his consent to the union. The evil which has resulted from this superficial and perfunctory course has been as great as it has been widespread. To-day the question of stricture, a slight, scarcely perceptible “latent gonorrhœa,” with its characteristic “gonococcus,” is looked into, and not until all trace of disease is eradicated is permission given for the union. A marital quarantine is as necessary to-day in social life as a national quarantine is for contagious diseases in general. ‘Few men, however eager for matrimony they may be, would run the great risks attendant upon precipitancy if they only knew of them clearly and positively. In no field of medicine is the old adage, “Prevention is better than cure,” more important than in this one. If physicians would do their duty fully in the matter, how many unfortunate women now languishing from “pyosalpinx” would in the next generation be saved!’ APPENDIX II. (PAGE 101) _The following important Memorandum lately issued is full of promise of a noble future in the British army._ MEMORANDUM BY THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF.