sound, an unreality for us. So one hears, as if
in a speaking-tube from a long distance, the words that Schaudinn and
Hoffmann, on April 19, 1905, discovered the germ that causes syphilis,
not realizing that the fact contained in those few brief words can alter
the undercurrent of human history, and may, within the lives of our
children and our children's children, remake the destiny of man on the
earth. A great spirit lives in the work of men like Metchnikoff and Roux
and Maisonneuve, who made possible the prophylaxis of syphilis, in that
of Bordet and Wassermann, who devised the remarkable blood test for the
disease, and in that of Ehrlich and Hata, who built up by a combination
of chemical and biological reasoning, salvarsan, one of the most
powerful weapons in existence against it. Ehrlich conceived the whole
make-up and properties of salvarsan when most of us find it a hardship
to pronounce its name. Schaudinn saw with the ordinary lenses of the
microscope in the living, moving germ, what dozens can scarcely see
today with the germ glued to the spot and with all the aid of stains and
dark-field apparatus. After all, it is brain-power focused to a point
that moves events, and to the immensity of that power the history of our
growing knowledge of syphilis bears the richest testimony.

Chapter II

Syphilis as a Social Problem

The simple device of talking plain, matter-of-fact English about a thing
has a value that we are growing to appreciate more and more every day.
It is only too easy for an undercurrent of ill to make headway under
cover of a false name, a false silence, or misleading speech. The fact
that syphilis is a disease spread to a considerable extent by sexual
relations too often forces us into an attitude of veiled insinuation
about it, a mistaken delicacy which easily becomes prudish and
insincere. It is a direct move in favor of vulgar thinking to misname
anything which involves the intimacies of life, or to do other than look
it squarely in the eye, when necessity demands, without shuffling or
equivocation. On this principle it is worth while to meet the problem of
a disease like syphilis with an open countenance and straightforward
honesty of expression. It puts firm ground under our feet to talk about
it in the impersonal way in which we talk about colds and pneumonia and
bunions and rheumatism, as unfortunate, but not necessarily indecent,
facts in human experience. Nothing in the past h