DOCTOR. No, no. We want no new laws: there are too many already. All that is needed is for people to understand the nature of this disease rather better. It would soon become the custom for a man who proposed for a girl’s hand to add to the other things for which he is asked a medical statement of bodily fitness, which would make it certain that he did not bring this plague into the family with him. It would be perfectly simple. Once it was the custom, the man would go to his doctor for a certificate of health before he could sign the register, just as now, before he can be married in church, he goes to his priest for a certificate that he has confessed. As things are, before a marriage is concluded the family lawyers meet to discuss matters: a meeting between the two doctors would be at least as useful and would prevent many misfortunes. Your enquiry, you see, was incomplete. Your daughter might well ask you, who are a man and a father, and ought to know these things, why you did not take as much trouble about her health as about her fortune. I tell you that you must forgive.
LOCHES. Never.
DOCTOR. Well: there is one last argument which, since I must, I will put to you. Are you yourself without sin, that you are so relentless to others?
LOCHES. I have never had any shameful disease, sir!
DOCTOR. I was not asking you that. I was asking you if you had never exposed yourself to catching one. [He pauses. Loches does not reply] Ah, you see! Then it is not virtue that has saved you: it is luck. Few things exasperate me more than that term ‘shameful disease,’ which you used just now. This disease is like all other diseases: it is one of our afflictions. There is no shame in being wretched—even if one deserves to be so. [Hotly] Come, come: let us have a little plain speaking! I should like to know how many of these rigid moralists, who are so choked with their middle-class prudery that they dare not mention the name syphilis, or when they bring themselves to speak of it do so with expressions of every sort of disgust, and treat its victims as criminals, have never run the risk of contracting it themselves. It is those alone who have the right to talk. How many do you think there are? Four out of a thousand? Well, leave those four aside; between all the rest and those who catch the disease there is no difference but chance. [Bursting out] And by heavens, those who escape won’t get much sympathy from me: the others at least have paid their fine of suffering and remorse, while they have gone scot-free! [Recovering himself] Let’s have done, if you please, once for all with this sort of hypocrisy. Your son-in-law, like yourself and like the immense majority of men, has had mistresses before he married. He has had the ill-luck to catch syphilis, and married supposing that the disease was no longer dangerous when in fact it still was. It is a misfortune that we must do our best to remedy, and not to aggravate. Perhaps in your youth you deserved what he has got even more than he; at any rate your position towards him is as that of the culprit who has escaped punishment towards his less fortunate comrade. That is a reflection that should, I think, touch you.
LOCHES. You put it in such a way—
DOCTOR. Am I not right?
LOCHES. Perhaps: but I can’t tell my daughter all this to persuade her to return to her husband.
DOCTOR. There are other arguments that you can use.