, cholera, after having committed serious ravages in
many parts of Europe, visited Scotland. It was evident to most thinking
people that, due to the extreme poverty and squalor of most of the
Scottish towns at that time, a great number of people would necessarily
succumb to this disease unless stringent sanitary measures were
instituted immediately. Instead, the Scotch clergy proposed to combat
this scourge with prayer and fasting, which would have lowered the
resistance to this disease by producing physical exhaustion and mental
depression. They proposed the ordering of a national fast day in which
the people were to sit the whole day without nourishment in their
churches and retire to their beds at night weeping and starved. Then it
was hoped that the Deity would be propitiated, and the plague stayed. To
give greater effect to this fast day, they called upon England to help
them, and the Presbytery of Edinburgh dispatched a letter to the
English minister, requesting information as to whether the queen would
appoint a national fast day. The English minister, to his credit,
advised the Presbytery of Edinburgh that it was better to cleanse than
to fast, and cleanse they must swiftly or else, in spite of all prayers
and fastings of a united but inactive nation, the cholera would
devastate them.

There are today, in this twentieth century, two pestilences which could
be wiped from the face of the earth. "There are two pestilences which
thus unfortunately involve moral conceptions. They are the plagues of
Syphilis and Gonorrhea. Against them medicine has developed methods of
control. They could be eradicated, but as yet civilization has not
advanced entirely beyond the ancient idea that disease is imposed by God
as a measure of vengeance for our sins. It still rejects protection,
when without it these plagues will continue to exact death and suffering
on a scale which probably exceeds that of any one of the medieval
plagues. Those who today look upon Syphilis and Gonorrhea as punishment
for sin have not progressed beyond the ideas of medieval Europe.

"Ignorance and bigotry are the twin allies of the plagues of Syphilis
and Gonorrhea. Medicine and civilization advance and regress together.
The conditions essential to advance are intellectual courage and a true
love for humanity. It is as true today as always in the past that
further advances or even the holding of what has already been won,
depend upon the extent to which