ly and conspicuously appalling of the venereal
diseases. Yet it is less frequent and in some respects less dangerously
insidious than the other chief venereal disease, gonorrhoea.[231]
At one time the serious nature of gonorrhoea, especially in women, was
little realized. Men accepted it with a light heart as a trivial accident;
women ignored it. This failure to realize the gravity of gonorrhoea, even
sometimes on the part of the medical profession--so that it has been
popularly looked upon, in Grandin's words, as of little more significance
than a cold in the nose--has led to a reaction on the part of some towards
an opposite extreme, and the risks and dangers of gonorrhoea have been
even unduly magnified. This is notably the case as regards sterility. The
inflammatory results of gonorrhoea are indubitably a potent cause of
sterility in both sexes; some authorities have stated that not only eighty
per cent. of the deaths from inflammatory diseases of the pelvic organs
and the majority of the cases of chronic invalidism in women, but ninety
per cent. of involuntary sterile marriages, are due to gonorrhoea.
Neisser, a great authority, ascribes to this disease without doubt fifty
per cent, of such marriages. Even this estimate is in the experience of
some observers excessive. It is fully proved that the great majority of
men who have had gonorrhoea, even if they marry within two years of being
infected, fail to convey the disease to their wives, and even of the women
infected by their husbands more than half have children. This is, for
instance, the result of Erb's experience, and Kisch speaks still more
strongly in the same sense. Bumm, again, although regarding gonorrhoea as
one of the two chief causes of sterility in women, finds that it is not
the most frequent cause, being only responsible for about one-third of the
cases; the other two-thirds are due to developmental faults in the genital
organs. Dunning in America has reached results which are fairly concordant
with Bumm's.

With regard to another of the terrible results of gonorrhoea, the part it
plays in producing life-long blindness from infection of the eyes at
birth, there has long been no sort of doubt. The Committee of the
Ophthalmological Society in 1884, reported that thirty to forty-one per
cent. of the inmates of four asylums for the blind in England owed their
blindness to this cause.[232] In German asylums Reinhard found that thirty
per cent. lost their