s symptoms characteristic of the
third stage of the disease. While syphilis is not so fatal to life as
tuberculosis, it is capable of causing more suffering and unhappiness,
and is directly transmitted from father to child, which is not the
case with consumption. Syphilis is also wholly preventable, which is
not true of tuberculosis at present. It is not probable that syphilis
is ever transmitted to the third generation directly, but deformities,
general debility, small and poor teeth, thin, scanty growth of hair,
nervous disorders, and a general miserable physique are seen in
children whose parents were the victims of inherited syphilis. In
married life syphilis may be communicated to the wife directly from
the primary sore on the penis of the husband during sexual
intercourse, but contamination of the wife more often happens from the
later manifestations of the disease in the husband, as from secretion
from open sores on the body or from the mouth, when the moist patches
exist there.

It is possible for a child to inherit syphilis from the father--when
the germs of syphilis are transmitted through the semen of the father
at the time of conception--and yet the mother escape the disease. On
the other hand, it is not uncommon for the child to become thus
infected and infect its mother while in her womb; or the mother may
receive syphilis from the husband after conception, and the child
become infected in the womb.

The chief social danger of syphilis comes from its introduction into
marriage and its morbid radiations through family and social life.
Probably one in every five cases of syphilis in women is communicated
by the husband in the marriage relation. There are so many sources and
modes of its contagion that it is spread from one person to another in
the ordinary relations of family and social life--from husband to wife
and child, from child to nurse, and to other members of the family, so
that small epidemics of syphilis may be traced to its introduction
into a family. Syphilis is the only disease which is transmitted in
full virulence to the offspring, and its effect is simply murderous.
As seen above, from sixty to eighty per cent of all children die
before or soon after birth. One-third of those born alive die within
the next six months, and those that finally survive are blighted in
their development, both physical and mental, and affected with various
organic defects and deformities which unfit them for the