“No cure is sure. Salvarsan, skillfully administered, is as near a specific as any known form of treatment. But we don’t know whether it has any effect at all upon locomotor ataxia or general paralysis, the after effects, which may destroy the patient fifteen or twenty years after the actual disease has been cured. All locomotor ataxia and all general paralysis come from syphilis. And these diseases are not only incurable, but are as nearly a hell on earth as poor humanity is ever called upon to endure. Of course, you know that a man who is base enough to marry with syphilis dooms his children. Fortunately seventy-five or eighty per cent of the offspring of such marriages die in infancy or early childhood. The rest grow up deficient in mind or body or both. Upwards of ten per cent of all insanity is syphilitic in its origin. “Both venereal diseases are terribly contagious. Innocence is no protection. Syphilis may be contracted from a drinking-cup or eating-utensil, or from the lips of an infected person having an open sore on the mouth. Gonorrhoea is spread by towels, by bathtubs, or from contaminated toilets. No person, however careful, is immune from either of the ‘red plagues.’ And yet the public is just beginning to be educated to the peril.” “Why wouldn’t that be a good topic for the Woman’s Club to discuss?” asked Grandma Sharpless. “Splendid!” said Dr. Strong. “That is, if they would allow you to talk about it.” “_Allow_ me!” The old lady’s firm chin tilted up sharply. “Who’s going to put the ban of silence on me?” “Nobody, I dare say, if you make up your mind to speak,” replied Dr. Strong, smiling. “But some will probably try. Would you believe that, only a short time since, a professor of hygiene in one of our leading universities had to abandon a course of lectures to the students because the wives of the faculty and trustees objected to his including venereal diseases in his course? And a well-known lecturer, who had been invited to speak on health protection before a list of colleges, suffered the indignity of having the invitation withdrawn because he insisted that he could not cover the ground without warning his hearers against the twin pestilences of vice.” “Are the colleges so greatly in need of that sort of warning?” asked Mrs. Clyde. “Subsequent records obtained from some of the protesting institutions showed that one third of the students had at some time been infected.” “I’m glad you’ve told my boy,” said Mrs. Clyde, rising. “I’ll talk to my girls.” “And I to the women,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “Then I’d better make a list, for both of you, of the literature on the subject which you will find useful,” said the Health Master. “I’ll give it to you later.”[4]