The Contagious Diseases Acts (Women) from a sanitary point of view : showing how and why such despotic measures not only fail to repress venereal disease, but tend to increase its most serious manifestations : containing the substance of a paper read before the Medical Society of London, Jan. 17th, 1870 / by Charles Bell Taylor.

Taylor, Charles Bell.

Date:: 1870

Credit: The Contagious Diseases Acts (Women) from a sanitary point of view : showing how and why such despotic measures not only fail to repress venereal disease, but tend to increase its most serious manifestations : containing the substance of a paper read before the Medical Society of London, Jan. 17th, 1870 / by Charles Bell Taylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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has been declining both, in extent and virulence with each succeeding decade for the last three centuries, until we can scarcely recognise it as the malady described by our forefathers. And it is a well-known fact, one which every practitioner can verify by a reference to his own cases, that the great majority of persons afflicted with this the worst form of venereal disease, are rapidly and permanently cured, never suffering afterwards themselves, or entailing disease on their offspring. Lancereaux, than whom no more modern or higher authority can be quoted, says in reference to this point, In the majority of cases, the general eruption once over, syphilis ceases as if it had completed its entire orbit. * * In these cases (far from being rare) syphilis is but an abortive disease, slight and benignant, it does not leave behind any troublesome trace of its passage. * * It is impossible to lay too much stress upon this point at the present day, when syphilis inspires exaggerated fears, it cannot be too widely known that this disease becomes dissipated completely in a great number of cases after the cessation of the cutaneus eruption, and sometimes even with the primary lesion. Agaiu, this eminent author remarks, An infected father does not necessarily transmit the disease from which he is suffering. More than this, we see children born and grow up quite healthy, both of whose parents are, or have been, syphilitic. (See Treatise on Syphilis, Historical and Practical, by Dr. E. Lancereaux, head of the Clinical Department of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, Laureate of the French Institution of the Faculty of Medicine, and of the Imperial Academy of Medicine, &c.) The editor of the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review for January, 1870, after endorsing John Hunter's statement, that syphilis is always syphilis, and cannot be transmuted into other diseases, and remarking upon the amount of deplorable nonsense that has been recently written on this and allied subjects, says: Syphilis is not a disease which is fatal to adults in its primary or secondary manifesta- tions, and the majority of those who have undergone the disease live as long as they could otherwise have expected to live, and die of diseases with which syphilis has no more to do than the man in the moon—they are active, useful, and wealth-producing members of society so long as they continue in it. Many years ago, Ambrose Par6, alluding to this form of venereal affection, said: the disease is evidently getting milder and milder every day; and Mr. Syme, of Edinburgh, in the last edition of his Standard Work on Surgery, remarks: It is now fully ascertained that the poison of the present day (true syphilis) though arising from similar local sores, does not give rise to the dreadful consequences which have been mentioned. The case may be tedious, and the skin,

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