E. W. Cushing, "Sociological Aspects of Gonorrhœa," Transactions American Gynecological Society, vol. xxii, 1897.
It is only in very small communities ruled by an autocratic power with absolute authority to control conditions and to examine persons of both sexes that reglementation becomes in any degree effectual. This is well shown by Dr. W. E. Harwood, who describes the system he organized in the mines of the Minnesota Iron Company (Journal American Medical Association, December 22, 1906). The women in the brothels on the company's estate were of the lowest class, and disease was very prevalent. Careful examination of the women was established, and control of the men, who, immediately on becoming diseased, were bound to declare by what woman they had been infected. The woman was responsible for the medical bill of the man she infected, and even for his board, if incapacitated, and the women were compelled to maintain a fund for their own hospital expenses when required. In this way venereal disease, though not entirely uprooted, was very greatly diminished.
A clear and comprehensive statement of the present position of the question is given by Iwan Bloch, Das Sexualleben Unserer Zeit, Chs. XIII-XV. How ineffectual the system of police regulation is, even in Germany, where police interference is tolerated to so marked a degree, may be illustrated by the case of Mannheim. Here the regulation of prostitution is very severe and thorough, yet a careful inquiry in 1905 among the doctors of Mannheim (ninety-two of whom sent in detailed returns) showed that of six hundred cases of venereal disease in men, nearly half had been contracted from prostitutes. About half the remaining cases (nearly a quarter of the whole) were due to waitresses and bar-maids; then followed servant-girls (Lion and Loeb, in Sexualpädagogik, the Proceedings of the Third German Congress for Combating Venereal Diseases, 1907, p. 295).