ome up for the
examination with a newly acquired sore while he knew I was away--in all
probability a reinfection. He was not even man enough to face me with
his broken word. Three or four men with chancres may report in an
afternoon and leave, the clinic powerless to detain them or to protect
others against the damage they may do. One such, a Greek boy, had
exposed four different women to infection before we saw him, and only
the most strenuous efforts of the entire staff got him into the
hospital, because he had neither money nor sense. Half-witted tramps,
gang laborers, and foreigners who cannot understand a word of any other
language than Lithuanian or some other of the European dialects for
which no interpreter can be secured, pass in a steady stream through the
free clinics of large cities. The impossibility of securing even the
simplest cooeperation from such patients is scarcely realized by any one
who is not called upon to deal with them face to face. Even with an
interpreter, they display the wilfulness of irresponsibility. One
Italian woman wiped her chancre, which was on her lip, with her fingers
at every other shake of the head. She was cooking for two boarders and
had two children. She did not like hospitals and was homesick and
pettish. Would she go over to the dispensary in the next block and find
out how to take care of herself? Not a bit of it. She was going home,
and she went. I saw the children later in the children's ward, both
infected with syphilis--a poor start in life. Criminal intent in the
transmission of syphilis is common enough, and the writer can think
off-hand of four or five cases in which men or women "got" their
estranged partners later in their careers.

+The Necessity for Legal Control.+--All these repulsive details have a
place in driving home a conception of the cost to society of the immoral
and irresponsible syphilitic. Syphilis is an infectious disease,
dangerous to the individual and to society. If it is rational to
quarantine a mouth and throat full of diphtheria germs, it is rational
to quarantine a mouth and throat full of syphilitic germs at least until
the germs are killed off for the time being. There can be no more excuse
for placing society at the mercy of the one than of the other.

+The Morbid Attitude of Mind: Syphilophobia.+--The morbid attitude of
mind, whether in persons who have the disease or in those who fear they
may have it, is one of the hardest the physicia