HIS AGONY
A Human Being goes past my house
Day after day, hour after hour,
Screaming in agony.
It is dreadful to hear him.
He beats the air with his hands, blindly, despairingly.
He shrieks with pain.
The passers-by do not notice him.
The woman who is with him does not notice him.
The policeman does not notice him.
No ambulance comes ringing.
No doctor rushes out of a house—no crowd collects.
He screams and screams.
No one notices him.
I bear him coming again.
It is terrible—one day after another.
I look out of my window.
Yes—the same Human Being—the same agony.
I cannot bear it. I rush down—out into the street.
I say to the woman who is with him—
"Why do you not do something?"
She says there is nothing to be done. She resents my interference.
She is a hired person, hired by the owner of the Human Being.
That is why no one does anything—
We dare not interfere with the Owner.
He is a very young Human Being,
That is why no one notices—
We are used to the sound of agony and the indifference of hired persons.
COMMENT AND REVIEW
The spread of social ethics among the medical profession is cause for great rejoicing. Long and justly celebrated as benefactors of humanity, and upholding with devotion the high ideals of their profession, they have now begun to widen their usefulness and extend their ideals under the general social awakening of our time.
Social sanitation is a rapidly extending process; as fast as our discoveries reveal the nature of disease or new remedies therefor, our governments, local and national, are beginning to safeguard the community.
In the general movement to lengthen and strengthen human life, doctors are necessarily most prominent because of their special knowledge. They have long been necessary. they have become more and more valuable, but their usefulness is still checked (as is true of all of us) by the persistence of conservatism and old ideas.
Very recently the advance of bacteriological science has thrown new light on a group of especially dangerous diseases; and still more recently the doctors themselves, with a splendid exertion of social conscience against tradition and habit, have begun to disseminate this new light to the general public.
Those special payments of the "wages of sin," spoken of in varying euphemisms, most commonly as "social diseases" are now better understood by physicians; and they are making noble efforts to spread this understanding among the people. Their efforts are gravely hindered by two obstacles; one the professional tradition known as "the medical secret," the other the universal prevalence of that primordial superstition—the sex tabu.
This last belongs to the very deepest sedimentary deposit in the human mind. The first rules the lowest savage peoples began to make were the sex tabus and food tabus. Secrecy, mystery, all manner of childish hocus pocus, were used to establish these primitive ideas; and the weight of that black past is upon its yet.
The less developed a race, the less educated a class, the more solemn and earnest they are in preserving the sex tabus; whereas with wide scientific knowledge this field of facts is seen to be like others; important and worth understanding; but not as special arcana to be concealed and avoided.