Now, is there a racial reason why men should be as chaste as women? There are two valid racial reasons why in the interest of posterity men should be held to as strict a form of chastity as women are. The two reasons are the “Spirocheta pallida” and the “Gonococcus,” or in other words, “syphilis” and “gonorrhoea.”
Of the triad of venereal infections, “chancroid” (chancroid may produce extensive ulcerative processes and mutilate the sexual organs), “syphilis” and “gonorrhoea” the two latter are of the greatest menace to the continuation of the human race. Especially gonorrhoea is undermining the vital forces of humanity, on account of its wide spread among men.
Neisser, the discoverer of the gonococcus, claims that of the adult male population inhabiting large cities only an insignificant proportion escapes gonorrhoeal infection.[EE]
The reason of the spread of gonorrhoea is the mistaken idea that gonorrhoea is a local trouble. Even among the educated people who have had the best opportunities of education and refinement, there are very few who know that gonorrhoea, once acquired, may remain latent for years and still be the means of infecting an innocent wife and destroying the eyesight of her child. The so-called cure of gonorrhoea is not seldom only the establishment of toleration of the presence of the gonococcus on the part of the individual’s urethra. But the imperceptible discharge still remains virulently contagious to the healthy virginal genito-urinary passage of the young wife and to the delicate tender conjunctiva of the new-born baby.
The non-multiplying gonococci, which have apparently been deprived of their power to cause suppuration any longer at the point of the first infection, may possess full virulence and also the capacity of producing suppuration if transferred to some other mucous membrane, especially in the virginal vulva, urethra, Bartholinian glands, cervix, tubes, ovaries and peritoneum of the newly-married wife.[EF]
Even if the non-multiplying gonococci should remain inactive in the female genital tract in the beginning of married life, they may do a great deal of damage later on. Gonococci may remain in the genital tract during the entire period of pregnancy, without clinical manifestations, and yet become active during the puerperium, which explains many obscure cases of puerperal infection. In this way the ignorance of the prolonged infectious character of latent chronic gonorrhoea has ruined many and many a young wife. The individual considers himself cured, while in fact the gonorrhoea remains contagious for many years to the innocent wife and her child.
The disease is markedly accentuated in virulence and danger in the wife and mother in fulfilling her marital and maternal functions, and the results of the disease are appalling. Eighty per cent. of the deaths from inflammatory diseases, peculiar to women, seventy-five per cent. of all special surgical operations performed on women, many of them serious desexing operations, and sixty per cent. of all the work done by specialists in diseases of women are the result of gonorrhoea. Besides the numerous fatal operations in the wake of gonorrhoea of the urogenital tract, septicaemia or pyaemia may sometimes develop, which, as a rule, lead to death.
The so-called one-child sterility is accounted for, in a large measure, by the extension of a preexisting gonorrhoeal infection during the puerperium. In this way fifty per cent. or more of all the infected women are rendered sterile, in addition many are condemned to a life-long invalidism. The aspirations, centred in motherhood and children, are thus swept away.
Besides mutilating the innocent women, gonorrhoea destroys the eyesight of innocent babies. From seventy to eighty per cent. of the ophthalmia, which blots out the eyes of babies, and fifteen to twenty-five per cent. of all blindness is caused by gonococcus infection. In the passage of the child through the infected maternal parts, the conjunctiva becomes, as a rule, infected, and the danger of blindness is imminent.[EG]
Besides this danger of infecting the innocent mother and child, gonorrhoea is not such an innocent disease even for the man himself. It is not a local disease only, it is a general infection and its manifestations may be as grave to the individual as syphilis. The infection may ascend to the urinary passages and cause a catarrh of the bladder and an infection of the ureters and kidneys. It may affect the genital organs, as the testicles and prostate in men, and uterus and tubes and ovaries in women. The germs of gonorrhoea may enter the blood and attack the joints. (Osier says: In many respects gonorrhoeal arthritis is the most damaging, disabling and serious of all the complications of gonorrhoea.) The germs may also enter the heart and cause endocarditis and they may invade the brain and cause meningitis and myelitis.[EH]