methods is a practical and attainable ideal in an even higher percentage of cases and offers all the assurance that any reasonable person need ask for the conduct of life. It should, therefore, be sought for in every case in which expert judgment deems it worth while. It cannot be said too often that prospect of radical cure depends first and foremost upon the stage of the disease at which treatment is begun, and that it is unreasonable to judge it by what it fails to accomplish in persons upon whom the infection has once thoroughly fastened itself. +Symptomatic or Incomplete Cure.+--Symptomatic "cure" is essentially a process of cloaking or glossing over the infection. It is easy to obtain in the early stages of the disease, and in a certain sense, the earlier in the course of the disease such half-way methods are applied, the worse it is for patient and public. In the late stages of the disease symptomatic cure of certain lesions is sometimes justifiable on the score that damage already done cannot be repaired, the risk of infecting others is over, and all that can be hoped for is to make some improvement in the condition. But applied early, symptomatic methods whisk the outward evidences temporarily out of sight, create a false sense of security, and leave the disease to proceed quietly below the surface, to the undoing of its victim. Such patients get an entirely false idea of their condition, and may refuse to believe that they are not really cured, or may have no occasion even to wonder whether they are or not until they are beyond help. Every statement that can be made about the danger of syphilis to the public health applies with full force to the symptomatically treated early case. Trifling relapses, highly contagious sores in the mouth, or elsewhere, are not prevented by symptomatic treatment and pass unnoticed the more readily because the patient feels himself secure in what has been done for him. In the first five years of an inefficiently treated infection, and sometimes longer, this danger is a very near and terrible one, to which thousands fall victims every year, and among them, perhaps, some of your friends and mine. Dangerous syphilis is imperfectly treated syphilis, and at any moment it may confront us in our drawing rooms, in the swimming pool, across the counter of the store, or in the milkman, the waitress, the barber. It confronts thousands of wives and children in the person of half-cured fathers, infected nurse-maids, and others intimately associated with their personal life. These dangers can be effectively removed from our midst by the substitution of radical for symptomatic methods and ideals of cure. A person under vigorous treatment with a view to radical cure, with the observation of his condition by a physician which that implies, is nearly harmless. In a reasonable time he can be made fit even for marriage. The whole contagious period of syphilis would lose its contagiousness if every patient and physician