till of unknown cause, is the second great modern plague. The
third great plague is syphilis, a disease which, in these times of
public enlightenment, is still shrouded in obscurity, entrenched behind
a barrier of silence, and armed, by our own ignorance and false shame,
with a thousand times its actual power to destroy. Against all of these
three great plagues medicine has pitted the choicest personalities, the
highest attainments, and the uttermost resources of human knowledge.
Against all of them it has made headway. It is one of the ironies, the
paradoxes, of fate that the disease against which the most tremendous
advances have been made, the most brilliant victories won, is the third
great plague, syphilis--the disease that still destroys us through our
ignorance or our refusal to know the truth.

We have crippled the power of tuberculosis through
knowledge,--wide-spread, universal knowledge,--rather than through any
miraculous discoveries other than that of the cause and the possibility
of cure. We shall in time obliterate cancer by the same means. Make a
disease a household word, and its power is gone. We are still far from
that day with syphilis. The third great plague is just dawning upon
us--a disease which in four centuries has already cost a whole inferno
of human misery and a heaven of human happiness. When we awake, we shall
in our turn destroy the destroyer--and the more swiftly because of the
power now in the hands of medicine to blot out the disease. To the day
of that awakening books like this are dedicated. The facts here
presented are the common property of the medical profession, and it is
impossible to claim originality for their substance. Almost every
sentence is written under the shadow of some advance in knowledge which
cost a life-time of some man's labor and self-sacrifice. The story of
the conquest of syphilis is a fabric of great names, great thoughts,
dazzling visions, epochal achievements. It is romance triumphant, not
the tissue of loathsomeness that common misconception makes it.

The purpose of this book is accordingly to put the accepted facts in
such a form that they will the more readily become matters of common
knowledge. By an appeal to those who can read the newspapers
intelligently and remember a little of their high-school physiology, an
immense body of interested citizens can be added to the forces of a
modern campaign against the third great plague. For such an awakening of