CHAPTER XIV
The central problem of the sexual question is, as I pointed out at the commencement of the previous chapter, the suppression of prostitution and of venereal diseases, the former evil being the principal focus of the latter. I say the principal “focus,” not the “cause.” For, if all prostitutes were healthy, we could leave prostitution quietly alone—leaving out of consideration the moral depravity to which it gives rise—and venereal diseases would spontaneously disappear.
This opinion I advance at the beginning of the chapter on venereal diseases because, even at the present day, there is a remarkable species of philosophy, or rather theology, of venereal diseases, which propounds the most extraordinary hypothesis regarding their origin.
For example, the Alsatian writer Alexander Weill, in his confused work “The Laws and Mysteries of Love,” writes:
“Why should we bother our heads about the cure of syphilis? If anyone wishes to get rid of any evil, he must first of all ascertain its causes in order to remove these. If the cause of it is removed, the evil disappears spontaneously. If the snake has been killed, its poison no longer does any harm. But how can we put an end to the causes of syphilis, when this disease is spontaneously renewed and increased day by day by means of neglected prostitution, and by our social laws which combine to oppose the monogamy of youth and the increase of population? If to-day we could cure all patients suffering from syphilis, to-morrow the same disease would return in a new form, for it would be recreated by the same irregularities that first led to its production (!) It is absolutely useless to employ iodide of potassium and mercury, for every new infringement of natural laws would again bring into being new incurable diseases, which can only be avoided by those who have firmly resolved to observe these laws strictly.”
Weill, indeed, goes so far as to maintain that every man who simultaneously, or rather in brief succession, has intercourse with two healthy women, acquires syphilis, even although both these women remain faithful to him, because “any kind of libertinism in sexual intercourse suffices by itself to give rise to this disease!”
According to this view, which is shared by many members of the laity, venereal diseases, and, above all, the worst of them, syphilis, would be as old as sexual licentiousness itself—that is, as old as the human race, and an inalienable associate of that race.
In my book on “The Origin of Syphilis” I have disproved this view. I have answered the question, so important alike on general philosophical and on social-hygienic grounds, regarding the true nature of syphilis, and have proved that syphilis (and also the other venereal diseases) had a definite local and temporal origin; that syphilis has not existed since the beginning of time; and that some day, when certain definite conditions are fulfilled, the disease will disappear.
The history of syphilis is a matter of profound practical importance. From that history we learn with certainty that the most dangerous and most dreaded of the venereal diseases has, for the European world, and for the “old world” in general, the character of a pure chance comer; and we learn that retrospectively—regarded from the point of view of our present experience—at the time when the disease first began to flourish, it might perhaps have been nipped in the bud.
It is hardly possible to overestimate the practical importance of the recognition of this fact—that for the old civilized world syphilis represents a historical phenomenon, that it has a history, a beginning, or, as Voltaire half-ironically remarks, a genealogy.