But if men were so reluctant, how much more so must women have been, who were universally held to have committed a crime if they had given any part of their body to the eyes of a stranger. Just as the assistance of the Physician was disdained in childbirth, and to account for the fact the fable of Agnodicé invented, in the same way in complaints of the genitals women hesitated to submit themselves to the inquisition of the Physician. But seeing the female sexual organs are pre-eminently the home and breeding place of Venereal disease, this closed what was precisely the most direct way to a correct understanding of maladies of the genitals. The ancient Physicians, like our own forefathers, could at best make leucorrhœa the universal scape-goat; and accordingly even _Galen_, as we shall find presently, laid no stress on the circumstance, and drew no inference from it, that wherever men were attacked by gonorrhœa, the women with whom they had had coition likewise suffered from the complaint. Further, to this general sense of shame was added a certain timidity before the professional status of real Physicians as a class, as well as the pretty universally prevalent idea of the _ignominiousness of a sickness brought on by a person’s own fault_, at any rate among the educated part of the population. This comes out in the following passage of _Plato_,[275] where he says: “Does it appear to you disgraceful to stand in need of medical help, when it is not wounds at all or such sicknesses as depend on the seasons that have befallen, but when a man through indolence and a way of life such as we have noted (i. e. a very luxurious one), is filled full of fluxes and accumulations of wind like a sea, giving occasion to the noble sons of Asclepius to designate these complaints by the names of superfetations and catarrhs?” This was more than a mere expression of individual opinion; there is no doubt affections of the genital organs, more especially if their relation to sexual intercourse was known, belonged to the class of diseases held to be most disgraceful,[276] and the Poet is justified in saying: _Diis me legitimis nimisque magnis_ Ut Phoebo puta, filioque Phoebi _Curatum dare mentulam verebar_. (To the lawful gods, deities too exalted for me, such for instance as Phoebus, and Phoebus’ son, I feared to entrust my member for cure.) Thus it was not to the “noble sons of Asclepius”, in other words the Physicians, who treated freemen only, that patients resorted for help, but to the gods, or else to the medical underlings (ὑπηρέται τῶν ἰατρῶν,—subordinate assistants of the physicians), to the slave-doctors and quacks, who plied their trade in the doctor’s shops,—establishments where, as we have seen above, paederasts and pathics foregathered. Exactly the same state of things prevailed down to the middle of the last Century; and to this day a majority of such sufferers rarely as a matter of fact come under any other hands.