Under this rational treatment, discharge and ulcer act as fontanels to the system. Not only the specific poison, but much of hereditary and acquired disease matter also are eliminated in the process; and after such a cure, blood and tissues of the patient are purer than they were before infection. The foregoing statement has nothing to do with the moral aspects involved in acquiring venereal diseases. In this connection we are dealing solely with the rational or irrational treatment of the infection after it has been contracted. We do not wish to intimate that it is advisable to cure the body by killing the soul. Nevertheless, we must deal with the facts in Nature as we find them. Furthermore, a great many persons, especially women and children, acquire these diseases innocently. Are we not justified in relieving their minds of needless fear and in showing them the way to prevent the dreadful sufferings of the secondary and tertiary stages brought on by suppressive drug treatment by means of mercury, the iodides, "606," etc.? These poisonous drugs suppress the initial lesion and diffuse the disease poison through the system. Nature takes up the work of elimination by means of skin eruptions and ulcers in various parts of the body, but these also are promptly suppressed with mercurial ointments and other alternatives. This process of suppression is continued for months and years, until the organism is so thoroughly saturated with alterative poisons that vital force can no longer react by acute reactions against the original syphilitic poisons. This state of vital paralysis is then called a cure. The medical professor, however, knows better. He instructs the students from the lecture platform: "When, after two or three years of mercurial treatment, syphilitic symptoms cease to appear, you may permit the patient to marry--but never guarantee a cure." Why not? Because the professor is aware that the offspring of such a union are born with hereditary symptoms well known to every physician, and because the patient thus cured (?) may turn up in the doctor's office at any time thereafter with a hole in his palate, ulcers on his body, caries of the bones or with other secondary and tertiary symptoms. Mercury has an especial affinity for the bony structures. It will work its way through the vertebrae of the spine and the bones of the skull into the nerve matter of the brain and spinal cord, causing inflammation, excruciating headaches, nervous symptoms, girdle pains, etc. These stages of acute inflammation are followed in a few years by sclerosis (hardening) of nerve matter and blood vessels, resulting in paresis, locomotor ataxy or paralysis agitans. Neither is it necessary to contract specific diseases in order to fall a victim to these dreadful conditions: mercury, iodine and other destructive alternatives are given in a hundred different forms for a multitude of other ailments.