is should forget that his having
had the disease does not confer any immunity, and that as soon as he is
cured he may acquire it again. It is possible, by a single exposure to
infection, to undo the whole effect of what has been done, just after a
cure is accomplished. There can be only one safe rule for infected as
well as uninfected persons--to keep away from the risk of syphilis.

+Quacks and Self-treatment.--Hot Springs.+--The temptation to take up
quack forms of treatment or to treat himself without the advice of a
physician besets the path of the syphilitic throughout the course of the
disease; an enormous number of fraudulent enterprises thrive on the
credulity of its victims. Most of them are of the patent medicine
specific type. Others, however, have a tinge of respectability and are
dangerous simply because they are insufficient and not carried out under
proper direction. Many popular superstitions as to the value of baths in
syphilis and of the usefulness of a short course of rubs with bathing,
or a "trip to the springs," are of this kind. Enough has been said in
the foregoing chapters to make it plain to any one who is open to
conviction that syphilis is no affair for the patient himself to attempt
to treat. The best judgment of the most skilled physicians is the least
that the victim owes himself in his effort to get well.

+Patient and Physician.+--For the same reasons every person who has or
has had syphilis, cured or not, or has been exposed to it, should make
it an absolute rule to inform his physician of the fact. The recognition
of many obscure conditions in medicine depends on this knowledge. For a
patient to falsify the facts or to ignore or conceal them is simply to
work against his own interests and to hinder his physician in his
efforts to benefit him.

Chapter XIV

Mental Attitudes in Their Relation to Syphilis

One's way of looking at a thing has an immense influence on what one
does about it. Obvious as this principle is in the every-day affairs of
life, it becomes still more obvious as one studies a disease and watches
the way in which different individuals react to it. The state of mind of
a few people infected with a rare condition may not seem a matter of
more than passing interest, but in a disease which is a wide-spread and
disastrous influence in human life, the sum-total of our states of mind
about it determines what we do against it and, to no small degree, what
it does t