Legislation and 'contagious diseases' : an extract from the inaugural address delivered before the American Medical Association at its 27th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, June 6, 1876 / by J. Marion Sims.

  • J. Marion Sims
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Legislation and 'contagious diseases' : an extract from the inaugural address delivered before the American Medical Association at its 27th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, June 6, 1876 / by J. Marion Sims. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    for us. We want no legislation that looks to licensing prosti- tution as in France, and we want no such partial legislation as we find in the ‘ Contagious Diseases Act ’ of England. We would not outrage religious sentiment by adopting a system of fostering vice ; nor should we subject the hardy soldier, even for his own good, to invidious restrictions not imposed upon others in the community. Besides, how absurd would the English system work with us when we have but a nominal army, and that scattered over the frontier, away from the pale of civilisation and its worst vices ! Class legislation in any shape, and for any purpose, is distasteful to the people of any country, and especially of ours. We know that cholera has a home where it is perpetually generated ; that transplanted, it flourishes for a while, then dies out, and seldom reappears, except by fresh importations from its original source of supply. But syphilis, unlike cholera, originating when and where it may, always fixes itself in great populous centres, taking up its abode in the haunts of ignorance, poverty, squalor, filth, and vice. From these low conditions of life, it mounts gradually higher and higher, and sometimes to the highest, so that in the end whole communities, so to speak, may become contaminated. To protect the public against its ravages, we must strike at the root of the evil. We must seek it out in its hot-beds, and circumvent it with such regulations as to pi event its transmission. WE must ask for such laws as will confei upon us the power of dealing with this disease as we already possess with regard to cholera and small-pox. The carriers of trade between nations, and between great commercial centres in the same nation, are the carrieis of syphilis. Syphilis is carried from city to city by men, and women scatter it far and wide in communities. One man may inoculate half a dozen women during the few days his ship lies in port, and these half-dozen degraded women may transmit the disease not only to scores of men, but hundreds
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