With proper treatment of the mother the infantile mortality in hereditary syphilis is reduced from 59 per centum to 3 per centum, and the children that are born living are not unfrequently free from syphilis. When a woman is infected at the conception of her child miscarriage takes place before the child is viable, from the first to the sixth month; later other miscarriages occur; later still, living but syphilitic children are born, of whom one-fourth die within the first six months; finally she may have children that are not infected. If a syphilitic man has been properly treated he may, after four years, beget healthy children, and he commonly does, but he may be the father of syphilitic children. Syphilitic women properly treated may, after about six years from infection, bring forth healthy children, and they commonly do, but not always. There is a wide diversity of opinion among the best authorities concerning the curability of syphilis. Gowers (_Syphilis and the Nervous System_. 1892) says: "There is no evidence that the disease ever is or ever has been cured, the {315} word 'disease' being here used to designate that which causes the various manifestations of the malady." He means there is no absolute proof that a person who has once been infected is ever so fully cured that he may marry without danger of transmitting the disease. Fournier requires, as the minimum time, four years of methodical treatment before he deems the patient safe, but even this arbitrary fixing of the number of years is not warranted by experience. Many physicians hold that in the tertiary stage the disease is not transmissible, but that statement is not true. Commonly it is, sometimes it is not. After all symptoms have disappeared the disease has been transmitted. In short, a person that wittingly marries any one who has had syphilis at any time is a fool; and if one of the contracting parties has had syphilis within the four years preceding the marriage the marriage is criminal, even if the syphilis has been carefully and skilfully treated by a physician. Gonorrhoea is always a dangerous disease. In the male, beside the acute lesions, it can cause chronic or fatal inflammations along the various parts of the genito-urinary tract or in different organs of the body. When the disease becomes chronic it lasts indefinitely. It may then cause cystitis, or so affect the kidneys as to bring about very grave results; it may get into the circulation and induce gonorrhoeal rheumatism of the joints, especially of the knee joint, and result in a partly or completely stiffened joint. The heart may be affected and endocarditis ensue; there may be meningitis or inflammation of the cerebral membranes; the eye may be infected, and unless it is skilfully treated blindness will follow. Strictures of the male urethra from chronic gonorrhoeal inflammation often require major surgical operations for relief.