The Third Great Plague: A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday PeopleStokes, John H. (John Hinchman)
History
The Third Great Plague: A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People
Stokes, John H. (John Hinchman)
Syphilis
+Dispensary Service.+--The provision of adequate treatment and
diagnostic facilities, on a par with those which will presently cover
Europe, will mean the following things: First of all, dispensaries, and
many of them, for the identification of early cases, fully equipped with
dark-field microscopes, with record systems, and with the means for
following patients from the time they enter until they are cured. This
means nurses, it means social service workers, it means doctors with
special and not general knowledge of syphilis and gonorrhea. The
Brooklyn Hospital Dispensary is an admirable example of what such an
institution should be, but it is one where such institutions should be
numbered by dozens and by hundreds. Copenhagen, with a population less
than that of several cities in this country which have none, has seven
municipal clinics whose hours and names are prominently advertised.
+Hospitals.+--In the second place there must be hospital facilities.
They must not be venereal hospitals, but services or parts of general
hospitals, so that patients who are received into them will be protected
from stigma and comment. Pontopidan, a Danish expert, estimated that for
the care of venereal disease one hospital bed to every 2000 of
population was insufficient, and yet there are cities in this country
which do not have one bed available for the purpose to 100,000 people.
The hospital performs a peculiarly valuable function in the care of
syphilis in particular. It provides for temporary quarantine, and for
the education of the patient in his responsibility to the community when
he is discharged. Three weeks or more under hospital direction is the
best possible start for an active syphilis that is to be cured. The
privacy of a syphilitic can be protected in a hospital as successfully
as in a specialist's office, and the quality of treatment which can be
given him is distinctly better than he can obtain while out and around.
Hospitals in general have kept their doors closed to syphilis until
recently, and it is only under the pressure of a growing understanding
of what this means to the public health that they are awakening to their
duty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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