The income of the dancing-saloons, liquor, and lager-beer stores, frequented and mainly supported by prostitutes and their friends, can not be less than $30 per week for each house, and as there are 151 establishments of that description, the aggregate of money disbursed in them will be $4530 per week, or $235,560 per year.
These sums exhibit the outlay for the pleasures of prostitution: the ensuing items give its penalties. Of the inmates of the Island (late the Penitentiary) Hospital, in 1857, over 65 per cent. were afflicted with venereal disease. The total expense of that institution for the year was $35,000, and the pro rata amount for syphilitic patients would be $22,750 during the year, or $438 per week.
Bellevue Hospital cost to maintain it during 1857, $70,000 in round numbers. The Medical Board say that ten per cent. of its inmates are treated for diseases originating in the syphilitic taint, and this proportion of the expenses being chargeable to prostitution amounts to $7000 per year, or $135 per week.
The Nursery Hospital on Randall’s Island cost the city of New York $17,000 for maintenance during 1857. One half its infant patients are treated for diseases resulting from venereal infection, and $8,500 per year, or $163 per week, is the quota of expense caused by this vice and its sequel.
The number of cases of venereal disease treated in the New York State Emigrants’ Hospital on Ward’s Island was 6½ per cent. of the total relieved on that island. The expenses for 1857 were $109,000, and the share chargeable to prostitution will be $7075 per year, or $136 per week.
In the New York City Hospital, Broadway, 14 per cent. of the patients during 1857 were treated for venereal disease. The cost of maintenance for that year was $59,000, and the share caused by prostitution was $8260 per year, or $159 per week.
The cases treated in dispensary practice have been averaged at three per cent. throughout the city. The yearly expenses of those charities are as follows:
| New York Dispensary | $9100 | |
| Northern Dispensary | 3550 | |
| Eastern Dispensary | 3700 | |
| Demilt Dispensary | 5300 | |
| Northwestern Dispensary | 2630 | |
| Total | $24,280 |
and the proportion chargeable to syphilis must be $728 per year, or $14 per week.
Very little expense is incurred by the medical colleges in the cases of syphilis treated at their clinical lectures, as the relief is generally confined to a prescription or a slight operation, and if medicine is supplied in a few cases the amount is so small that in a calculation of this sort it is not worth notice.