“Extent of venereal disease:
| Cavalry | 11,205 |
| Foot-guards | 10,043 |
| Infantry | 44,435 |
| Total | 65,683 |
| Deaths | 17 |
“Number of men per 1000 of strength admitted during ten years:
| “Cavalry | 206 |
| Foot-guards | 250 |
| Infantry | 277 |
“This report was drawn up by Dr. Balfour and Sir Alexander Tulloch, and the reason that a distinction is made between the line and the foot-guards, is that the line contains a large number of recruits and men returning from foreign service, whereas in the foot-guards, there is usually a much greater proportion of soldiers who have arrived at maturity, on the one hand, and who, on the other, have not served in foreign climates. As these circumstances were likely to have affected the amount of sickness and mortality, the returns of the two classes were kept distinct and separate in preparing the tables.
“Few infected soldiers escape notice, as health inspections are made once a week, which is the general rule in the service. If a soldier is found at inspection to be labouring under disease, he is reported for having concealed it to his superior officer, who orders him punishment drill on his discharge from hospital. In order to induce him to apply early for relief, the soldier is told that if he do so, he may probably be only a few days instead of several weeks under treatment.
“It is contrary to the rules of the service, to treat men out of hospital; even were it otherwise, the habits of the soldier, and the accommodation in barracks, would not favour celerity of cure.”[93]
In the brigade of Guards, though the average of syphilis primitiva is heavy, as above stated, only 11 per cent. of the cases are followed by secondary symptoms, which, however, follow 33 per cent. of the cases in the line. Dr. Balfour says a mild mercurial system is usually pursued in the army; and indeed mercury by many surgeons is held absolutely necessary for hard, or Hunterian chancres.
A woman was pointed out to me in a Music Hall in Knightsbridge, who my informant told me he was positively assured had only yesterday had two buboes lanced; and yet she was present at that scene of apparent festivity, contaminating the very air, like a deadly upas tree, and poisoning the blood of the nation, with the most audacious recklessness. It is useless to say that such things should not be. They exist, and they will exist. The woman was nothing better than a paid murderess, committing crime with impunity. She was so well known that she had obtained the soubriquet of the “hospital” as she was so frequently an inmate of one, and as she so often sent others to a similar involuntary confinement.
Those women who, for the sake of distinguishing them from the professionals, I must call amateurs, are generally spoken of as “Dollymops.” Now many servant-maids, nurse-maids who go with children into the Parks, shop girls and milliners who may be met with at the various “dancing academies,” so called, are “Dollymops.” We must separate these latter again from the “Demoiselle de Comptoir,” who is just as much in point of fact a “Dollymop,” because she prostitutes herself for her own pleasure, a few trifling presents or a little money now and then, and not altogether to maintain herself. But she will not go to casinos, or any similar places to pick up men; she makes their acquaintance in a clandestine manner: either she is accosted in the street early in the evening as she is returning from her place of business to her lodgings, or she carries on a flirtation behind the counter, which, as a matter of course, ends in an assignation.