This principle was equally applied to affections of the genitals, the antecedent act of coition being regarded as affording absolutely no help in diagnosis, as we see from the passage of _Galen_ to be next discussed. In this passage the declaration of a gonorrhœal patient to the effect that the women with whom he had connection suffered no less than himself from the malady, was entirely without influence on our author in the way of inducing him to assume and lay down a _specific_ type of gonorrhœa. Under these circumstances it is really a matter for no surprise[290] that the old Physicians in discussing affections of the genitals never allege sexual intercourse as an occasioning factor amongst others; and the conclusion drawn that such affections in Antiquity were not contracted by coition, _because_ the ancient Writers do not definitely and in every single instance assign this as a cause, evidences really and truly merely the absence of any accurate study of their works and the knowledge of their views that is acquired as a result of such study. It is abundantly clear however that the neglect of the etiological factors referred to led eventually to their being completely overlooked; and it is no less obvious that this must needs have been a source of manifold mistakes, which degraded the physician in the eyes of the non-professional laity, very often made him ridiculous by reason of this ignorance, and brought down, as we have seen, many a cut of the satirist’s whip on his devoted shoulders. But how many of our colleagues are there not at the present day whom Venereal disease involves in the same doubts and difficulties?