[EF] When a newly married woman experiences a burning pain in urinating, noticing at the same time a certain leucorrhoea, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it is caused by the gonococcus. If two weeks after she was married, she feels pain in her lower abdomen, the case is suspicious of gonorrhoeal salpingitis. The gonorrhoeal infection reaches the tubes about ten to fourteen days after the initial infection of the cervix. The vagina may not be affected at all. Gonorrhoeal vaginitis is exceedingly rare. The pavement epithelium, covering the vaginal surface, seems to afford protection against the specific infection. Gonorrhoeal endometritis is also rare. Gonorrhoea infects the female genital tract by jumps. From the urethra and vulva the infection jumps to the cervix and hence to the tubes and ovaries.
[EG] According to Neisser there are in Germany thirty thousand blind persons whose loss of sight may be thus accounted for.
[EH] These gonorrhoeal complications may serve as a deterrent for the individual but would have nothing to do with morality, if they would not also be met with in the innocent party. If gonorrhoea and its complications would only affect the individual that voluntarily exposes itself to infection, it would be of no more moral concern than measles or pneumonia. But gonorrhoea insidiously strikes the innocent women and children. Hence it is subject to the “moral imperative,” “Thou shalt not kill, blind or maim your wife and child.” To give such a loathsome disease to another person is hence a moral crime, apart from the fact that the misconduct of the unchaste man is to the detriment of himself and of the race and is immoral. Still writers who call themselves independent thinkers demand yet better proofs of the immorality of man’s unchastity.
The only excuse for the men who carry gonorrhoea into their families is that they do not know the consequences. As a rule, the misfortune comes upon the family quite unaware. The man cannot even be blamed of negligence. Not only the woman acquires gonorrhoea without her knowledge and in absence of all local or general symptoms, but even the man does not know that he is still harboring infectious material in his genital tract.
Prof. Bum has found gonococci in the urine and in the urethral secretions, five and ten years after the onset of the infection. At such a late period no man ever thinks of still being infectious, and in this way he becomes not infrequently unaware the murderer of his mate.
[EI] The prevalence of syphilis is estimated at 18 per cent. of the adult population. Ruggles found in New York City, in the better class of families, one-third of the sons of adult age to be infected with syphilis. Syphilis causes about forty per cent. of all miscarriages. The mortality of syphilitic children is about sixty per cent. Syphilis is the only disease transmitted to the offspring in full virulence. Sixty to eighty per cent. of all infected children die before they are born, or come into the world with the mark of death upon them. The mortality of the children who have inherited syphilis from the father is about twenty-eight per cent., of those who have inherited it from the mother is over sixty per cent. A large number of those who survive childhood dies from hereditary syphilis between the ages of ten and twenty.
[EJ] Let several men in the club or at the saloon-bar touch in their conversation the topic of sex, and they will poke fun at the man who never had a venereal disease.
[EK] Among the European working-classes and peasants, according to Ellen Key, the free union of love has long been the custom. This premature sexual life contributes to hinder the full bodily and mental development of the lower classes.
[EL] All ethical possessions in the inner man, his modesty, morality, his divine adoration, his aesthetic and his social service are all due to the repression of sexuality.
[EM] Pflüger (In Jacobsohn’s Article, St. Petersburg Med. Wochenschr., 1907, p. 97) says: If all the authorities of the world should proclaim the innocuousness of continence, it would have no influence upon youth, for forces are here active which will break every obstacle.