But granting these maladies originated in coition, there must necessarily have been some other factors active as well, besides the mere act. Thus when patients are found explaining to the physician (Galen) that the women with whom they had accomplished coition suffered from the same evil as themselves (gonorrhœa), no one surely can suppose anything but that a transmission of the disease took place in virtue of a contagion. Such affections of the genitals as are transmitted in coition by contagion we are wont to regard as primary forms of Venereal disease; and those acquired and disseminated in the same way in Antiquity must accordingly be designated by the same name. But these primary forms extended not only to the genitals; they were equally and in the same way acquired through the various modes of _Venus illegitima_ (abnormal Love) in the anus and the mouth, localities where we are accustomed nowadays to see the secondary symptoms chiefly appear. Consequently it was impossible for the Ancients,—and is really and truly no less so down to the present moment for the Moderns,—to make a definite distinction between primary and secondary forms. It is equally impossible to deny outright the former existence of the latter in these localities, the more so as, however wide the dissemination of vicious practices of various sorts, no very large number of men suffering from a diseased member are likely to have misused mouth or anus. But if we are forced in considering the secondary forms to leave mouth and anus almost entirely out of the question,[434] then only cutaneous diseases and those affecting the bones are left us, for _ozaena_ (fetid polypus), which was regarded as incurable by the Ancient physicians,[435] cannot any more than the others be taken into account in connection with primary affections of the mouth, unless indeed we are prepared to look upon the ῥέγχειν (snorting) of the men of Tarsus as a secondary complaint of pathics.