Besides all this, we actually find to the present day that in the countries in question the contagion exhibits but a low degree of virulence, and only under epidemic influence, as at the epoch of the Athenian Plague, did it assume a virulent character at all,—a fact that will be made yet clearer in our Continuation of the History of Venereal Disease. But wherever the contagion did exhibit this virulence of character, the ulcers that were set up passed over as a rule into gangrenous mortification, or else the physicians either exterminated it altogether by the actual cautery or removed it along with the part in which it had established itself. Thus any further spread of the contagion in its original form was not to be expected, as in patients of the sort there can be no doubt all desire for coition must have been destroyed. If we now bring together the results of our discussion so far, we shall find reason to believe that, speaking generally, the ancient physicians,—that is physicians properly so called,—possessed but scanty opportunities, especially in the case of women,[294] of observing with any precision the origin and course of affections of the genital organs, for it was mostly only the malignant forms of these that came under their notice, and these were of their very nature, except when epidemic conditions were at work, necessarily of infrequent occurrence. Their pathological views stood in the way of unprejudiced observation, _conspicuous_ characteristic symptoms were as little to be found then as they are nowadays, any adequate knowledge of the material _substrata_ of contagions was lacking to them in these as in other forms of disease, and thus they felt no direct inducement to class the _primary_ affections of the genitals as forming a special category of disease.