sight from the same cause. The total number of
persons blind from gonorrhoeal infection from their mothers at birth is
enormous. The British Royal Commission on the Condition of the Blind
estimated there were about seven thousand persons in the United Kingdom
alone (or twenty-two per cent. of the blind persons in the country) who
became blind as the result of this disease, and Mookerji stated in his
address on Ophthalmalogy at the Indian Medical Congress of 1894 that in
Bengal alone there were six hundred thousand totally blind beggars, forty
per cent. of whom lost their sight at birth through maternal gonorrhoea;
and this refers to the beggar class alone.

Although gonorrhoea is liable to produce many and various calamities,[233]
there can be no doubt that the majority of gonorrhoeal persons escape
either suffering or inflicting any very serious injury. The special reason
why gonorrhoea has become so peculiarly serious a scourge is its extreme
prevalence. It is difficult to estimate the proportion of men and women in
the general population who have had gonorrhoea, and the estimates vary
within wide limits. They are often set too high. Erb, of Heidelberg,
anxious to disprove exaggerated estimates of the prevalence of gonorrhoea,
went over the records of two thousand two hundred patients in his private
practice (excluding all hospital patients) and found the proportion of
those who had suffered from gonorrhoea was 48.5 per cent.

Among the working classes the disease is much less prevalent than among
higher-class people. In a Berlin Industrial Sick Club, 412 per 10,000 men
and 69 per 10,000 women had gonorrhoea in a year; taking a series of years
the Club showed a steady increase in the number of men, and decrease in
the number of women, with venereal infection; this seems to indicate that
the laboring classes are beginning to have intercourse more with
prostitutes and less with respectable girls.[234] In America Wood Ruggles
has given (as had Noggerath previously, for New York), the prevalence of
gonorrhoea among adult males as from 75 to 80 per cent.; Tenney places it
much lower, 20 per cent. for males and 5 per cent. for females. In
England, a writer in the _Lancet_, some years ago,[235] found as the
result of experience and inquiries that 75 per cent. adult males have had
gonorrhoea once, 40 per cent. twice, 15 per cent. three or more times.
According to Dulberg about twenty per cent. of new cases occur in married
m