Hereditary Syphilis.
Nowhere else are the ravages of Syphilis more destructive and cruel; no other disease punishes the offspring for the sins of its parents so ruthlessly and wantonly; no other scourge inflicts its terrible retribution on the second generation at such a tender age as hereditary Syphilis. Hereditary Syphilis is undoubtedly the saddest and most gruesome chapter in the long black record of Syphilis.
The offspring may inherit Syphilis from his father thru sperma (semen), from his mother thru ovum and blood circulation, or it may get infection from both parents at once. Most of the cases are due to infection from the father. Fortunately, experience has shown that the older the case of Syphilis is, and the better it has been treated, the more chance the offspring has to escape a syphilitic heredity, and the milder will the infection be if it be inherited.
If a man in the active stage of Syphilis marries a healthy woman, whether she herself be infected or not, she will not bear living children for a certain period of time. The first two or three years she will miscarry in the early months of pregnancy, a truly merciful provision on the part of nature, as death is certainly preferable to the drawn-out agony of the little creature, mutilated and crippled from birth. A little later the wife of a syphilitic is able to carry children to a full term, but they are born with the indelible stamp of loathsome heredity on their dwarfed bodies. The appearance of such children is as pitiful as it is repulsive. Wizened, old-looking faces, stunted bodies, numerous sores and skin eruptions, bone deformities, soft joints, due to decaying of bone ends and skulls distended with water; these and many other defects are the legacy these innocent victims come into the world with. Naturally, the vitality of such children is so low that many of them die in early infancy. Yet some of them can be saved by an early and thorough treatment. The farther it goes the more healthy-looking children are born, the fewer evidences of syphilitic heredity they present, and the later in life these evidences develop. Gradually, as the father or both parents receive proper treatment, their offspring born are more and more healthy and free from taint. There is no question whatsoever that syphilitic parents, one or both, can have, after they have cured themselves, perfectly healthy children, physically and mentally free from any blood taint or possibility of later relapses.