As a matter of fact in the great majority of instances the Physician had only the chronic form to treat. Generally speaking a patient first notices the complaint, when the discharge begins; and then the latter, when once the inflammatory stage is over, proceeds day and night undisturbed and without special voluptuous feeling, without wanton dreams,[315] often without any particular sensation at all. The actual discharge is a thin, cold, pale, sterile flux. Towards the end of the illness it becomes thicker, assumes an acrid quality, and eventually ceases altogether to flow.[316] But if the malady persists, especially in young people, then according to _Aretaeus_, the whole visage of the sufferers assumes a greyish look; they grow sluggish, atonic, spiritless, faint-hearted, indolent, dull, weak, emaciated, incapable of effort, unhealthy-looking,[317] pale, womanish, have no appetite, feel chilly, complain of heaviness in the limbs, are weak-loined, feeble and unfit for anything. According to _Galen_, the abdomen falls in, besides all the rest of the body collapsing more or less and withering; while patients become lean, of a yellowish pale complexion and hollow-eyed. In this way the complaint not unfrequently paves the road to paralysis, or else sufferers die of _tabes_ or wasting.[318] Specifically and in itself the disease is not dangerous, but it provokes various other complaints, and represents a highly disagreeable, ill-reputed affection (Aretaeus),[319] that almost always follows a chronic course,[320]—for which reason Aretaeus and Caelius Aurelianus actually treat of it under the head of chronic diseases. Gonorrhœal pus is infectious, as is implied by the Mosaic Laws of Purification (Leviticus Ch. XV.), and the malady is communicated by coition, as is seen from the words of _Galen_,—p. 428. But as early as the Fourth Century the idea was prevalent that the _conjunction of the stars_ was not devoid of influence, as such or such a conjunction might from a man’s very birth determine that _the individual was to die of gonorrhœa_. This at any rate is maintained by _Julius Firmicus Maternus_,[321] who lived in the time of Constantine the Great. The disease has to be carefully distinguished from the nocturnal pollutions,[322] that are at times one of the sequelae of gonorrhœa.