s can be effectively
removed from our midst by the substitution of radical for symptomatic
methods and ideals of cure. A person under vigorous treatment with a
view to radical cure, with the observation of his condition by a
physician which that implies, is nearly harmless. In a reasonable time
he can be made fit even for marriage. The whole contagious period of
syphilis would lose its contagiousness if every patient and physician
refused to think of anything but radical cure.

In such a demand as this for the highest ideals in the treatment of a
disease like syphilis, the medical profession must, of course, stand
prepared to do its share toward securing the best results. No one
concedes more freely than the physician himself that, in the recognition
and radical treatment of syphilis, not all the members of the medical
profession are abreast of the most advanced knowledge of the subject.
Syphilis, almost up to the present day, has never been adequately taught
as part of a medical training. Those who obtained a smattering of
knowledge about it from half a dozen sources in their school days were
fortunate. Thorough knowledge of the disease, of the infinite variety of
its forms, of the surest means of recognizing it, and the best methods
of treating it, is only beginning to be available for medical students
at the hands of expert teachers of the subject. The profession, by the
great advances in the medical teaching of syphilis in the past ten
years, and the greater advances yet to come, is, however, doing its best
to meet its share of responsibility in preparation for a successful
campaign. The combination of the physician who insists on curing
syphilis, with the patient who insists on being cured, may well be
irresistible.

+Factors Influencing the Cure of Syphilis.--Cost.+--We must admit that,
as matters stand now, few patients are interested in more than a
symptomatic cure. Yet the increasing demand for blood tests, for
example, shows that they are waking up. Ignorance of the possibility and
necessity for radical cure, and of the means of obtaining it, explains
much of the indifference which leads patients to disappear from their
physician's care just as the goal is in sight. But there is another
reason why syphilis is so seldom cured, and this is one which every
forward-looking man and woman should heed. The cure of syphilis means
from two to four years of medical care. All of us know the cost of such
services for ev