l the assurance that any reasonable person need
ask for the conduct of life. It should, therefore, be sought for in
every case in which expert judgment deems it worth while. It cannot be
said too often that prospect of radical cure depends first and foremost
upon the stage of the disease at which treatment is begun, and that it
is unreasonable to judge it by what it fails to accomplish in persons
upon whom the infection has once thoroughly fastened itself.

+Symptomatic or Incomplete Cure.+--Symptomatic "cure" is essentially a
process of cloaking or glossing over the infection. It is easy to obtain
in the early stages of the disease, and in a certain sense, the earlier
in the course of the disease such half-way methods are applied, the
worse it is for patient and public. In the late stages of the disease
symptomatic cure of certain lesions is sometimes justifiable on the
score that damage already done cannot be repaired, the risk of infecting
others is over, and all that can be hoped for is to make some
improvement in the condition. But applied early, symptomatic methods
whisk the outward evidences temporarily out of sight, create a false
sense of security, and leave the disease to proceed quietly below the
surface, to the undoing of its victim. Such patients get an entirely
false idea of their condition, and may refuse to believe that they are
not really cured, or may have no occasion even to wonder whether they
are or not until they are beyond help. Every statement that can be made
about the danger of syphilis to the public health applies with full
force to the symptomatically treated early case. Trifling relapses,
highly contagious sores in the mouth, or elsewhere, are not prevented by
symptomatic treatment and pass unnoticed the more readily because the
patient feels himself secure in what has been done for him. In the first
five years of an inefficiently treated infection, and sometimes longer,
this danger is a very near and terrible one, to which thousands fall
victims every year, and among them, perhaps, some of your friends and
mine. Dangerous syphilis is imperfectly treated syphilis, and at any
moment it may confront us in our drawing rooms, in the swimming pool,
across the counter of the store, or in the milkman, the waitress, the
barber. It confronts thousands of wives and children in the person of
half-cured fathers, infected nurse-maids, and others intimately
associated with their personal life. These danger