Wolff[155] studied a group of nine syphilitic women and their children. There were sixty-six pregnancies, but only thirty-three viable children were born. Of these last fourteen died in childhood, three committed suicide at twelve, twenty, and twenty-eight years of age; and of the thirteen still living only two were normal. The others are all feeble-minded, epileptic, hysteric, or otherwise neurotic. Post[156] tabulated the mortality in thirty syphilitic families in which there were 168 pregnancies. Of these fifty-three ended in still-birth or miscarriage and there were forty-four early deaths--a total loss of 57 per cent. Of the children that were born alive 38 per cent. are now dead, and of the seventy-one that are alive only thirty-nine are apparently healthy. There are very many cases of diseased children and adults with serious lesions of obscure etiology, and in a great number of instances of anemia, malnutrition, extreme nervousness, aortitis, bone diseases, vague pain, and similar conditions, the origin is congenital syphilis. Stoll,[157] in sixty-eight such cases, found a positive luetin syphilitic reaction, and a positive Wassermann in 17 per cent. [155] _Zeitschr. f. klinisch. Med._, vol. lxxvi. Berlin. [156] _Boston Med. and Surg. Jour._, vol. clvii, n. 4. [157] _Jour. Amer. Med. Assoc._, October 31, 1914. Gottheil,[158] professor of dermatology and syphilography in Fordham University, holds that if a man has gone through a modern treatment for syphilis, given by a competent physician and extended over three years, and if during the fourth year, without treatment, he repeatedly shows a negative Wassermann reaction, he may marry. That is the common opinion of physicians, but it is decidedly erroneous. [158] _Forchheimer's Therapeusis of Internal Diseases_, vol. ii, p. 421. New York, 1913. In one series of 562 cases of hereditary syphilis observed by the great syphilographer Fournier, sixty children, or over 10 per cent., were infected more than six years after the primary parental inoculation. He tells of one woman who had nineteen consecutive still-births from syphilis. Gowers[159] says: "There is no evidence that the disease ever is or ever has been cured, the word 'disease' being here used to designate that which causes the various manifestations of the malady." This statement is too sweeping, but it is very near the truth. [159] _Syphilis and the Nervous System_, 1892.