A Chicago physician writes to the Chicago Society of Social Hygiene:
"Several years ago there came under my care a case that I can never forget. The patient was a bride twenty-two years old, a beautiful woman of excellent family. She was suffering from a disease contracted from her husband, who had supposed himself cured before the wedding. An operation, which offered the only chance of saving her life, was performed. All went well for a few days. Her husband, who had been constantly with her, was called away on urgent business. The patient suddenly became worse and died before his return."
These two beautiful brides, and countless thousands like them, were killed by a disease of which young men are not afraid, of which they make light in their ignorance. Any physician will attest these statements. Some surgeons attribute three-fourths of the surgical operations on women to this disease; one-fourth is a very conservative reckoning.
THE REMEDY.
Mr. Edward Bok, editor of The Ladies' Home Journal, on the editor's personal page of that magazine for September, 1908, puts the responsibility for meeting these terrible evils upon parents. He wrote:
"First: We parents must first of all get it into our heads firm and fast to do away with the policy of silence with our children, that has done so much to bring about this condition. Our sons and our daughters must be told what they are, and they must be told lovingly and frankly. But told they must be.
"Second: We fathers of daughters must rid ourselves of the notion that has worked such diabolical havoc of a double moral standard. There can be but one standard: that of moral equality. Instead of being so painfully anxious about the 'financial prospects' of a young man who seeks the hand of our daughter in marriage, and making that the first question, it is time that we put health first and money second: that we find out, first of all, if the young man comes to court, as the lawyers say, with clean hands. Let a father ask the young man, as his leading question, whether he is physically clean: insist that he shall go to his family physician, and if he gives him a clean bill of health, then his financial prospects can be gone into. But his physical self first. That much every father would do in the case of a horse or a dog that he bought with a view to mating. Yet he does less for his daughter—his own flesh and blood."
Dr. William Osler, formerly of Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, now of the University of Oxford, in an article describing the diseases which are the greatest scourges of the human race, such as cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, consumption, pneumonia and leprosy, wrote of the group of vice diseases:
"These are in one respect the worst of all we have to mention, for they are the only ones transmitted in full virulence to innocent children to fill their lives with suffering, and which involve equally innocent wives in the misery and shame."
E. A. B.