< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu
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THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.

Mr. Holmes Coote, F. R. C. S., Surgeon and Lecturer on Surgery at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, says:

"It is a lamentable truth that the troubles which respectable, hard-working married women of the working-class undergo are more trying to the health, and detrimental to the looks, than any of the irregularities of the harlot's career."

Again, it is stated by Mr. Byrne, Surgeon to the Dublin Lock Hospital, that "there is not nearly so much syphilis as there used to be;" and, after describing some of the serious results that were once common, he adds: "You will not see such a case for years—a fact that no medical man can have failed to remark." Mr. W. Burns Thompson, F. R. C. S., for ten years head of the Edinburgh Dispensary, testifies as follows:

"I have had good opportunities of knowing the prevailing diseases, and I can only say that the representations given by the advocates of these Acts are to me perfectly unintelligible; they seem to me to be gross exaggeration."

Mr. Surgeon-Major Wyatt, of the Coldstream Guards, when examined by the Lords' Committee, stated that he quite concurred with Mr. Skey. Answering question 700, he said:

"The class of syphilitic diseases which we see are of a very mild character; and, in fact, none of the ravages which used formerly to be committed on the appearance and aspect of the men are now to be seen.... It is an undoubted fact that in this country and in France the character of the disease is much diminished in intensity.—Question: 708. I understand you to say, that in your opinion the venereal disease has generally, independent of the Act, become more mitigated, and of a milder type? Answer: Yes; that is the experience of all surgeons, both civil and military."

Dr. Druitt, President of the Association of the Medical Officers of Health for London, affirmed at one of its meetings—

"that speaking from thirty-nine years' experience, he was in a position to say that cases of syphilis in London were rare among the middle and better classes, and soon got over."

And even Mr. Acton, a specialist, to whom more than to any other man the Acts are due, admitted before the Lords' Committee that "the disease is milder than it was formerly."

Like testimony is given by Continental surgeons, among whom it was long ago said by Ambrose Paré, that the disease "is evidently becoming milder every day;" and by Auzias Turenne, that "it is on the wane all over Europe." Astruc and Diday concur in this statement. And the latest authority on syphilis, Lancereaux, whose work is so valued that it has been translated by the Sydenham Society, asserts-that—

"In these cases, which are far from being rare, syphilis is but an abortive disease; slight and benignant, it does not leave behind any troublesome trace of
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