sexual contacts. But in the majority of
cases it is the result of ordinary and slight kisses as between young
children, between parents and children, between lovers and friends and
acquaintances. Fairly typical examples, which have been reported, are
those of a child, kissed by a prostitute, who became infected and
subsequently infected its mother and grandmother; of a young French bride
contaminated on her wedding-day by one of the guests who, according to
French custom, kissed her on the cheek after the ceremony; of an American
girl who, returning from a ball, kissed, at parting, the young man who had
accompanied her home, thus acquiring the disease which she not long
afterwards imparted in the same way to her mother and three sisters. The
ignorant and unthinking are apt to ridicule those who point out the
serious risks of miscellaneous kissing. But it remains nevertheless true
that people who are not intimate enough to know the state of each other's
health are not intimate enough to kiss each other. Infection by the use of
domestic utensils, linen, etc., while comparatively rare among the better
social classes, is extremely common among the lower classes and among the
less civilized nations; in Russia, according to Tarnowsky, the chief
authority, seventy per cent. of all cases of syphilis in the rural
districts are due to this cause and to ordinary kissing, and a special
conference in St. Petersburg in 1897, for the consideration of the methods
of dealing with venereal disease, recorded its opinion to the same effect;
much the same seems to be true regarding Bosnia and various parts of the
Balkan peninsula where syphilis is extremely prevalent among the
peasantry. As regards the last group, according to Bulkley in America,
fifty per cent. of women generally contract syphilis innocently, chiefly
from their husbands, while Fournier states that in France seventy-five per
cent. of married women with syphilis have been infected by their husbands,
most frequently (seventy per cent.) by husbands who were themselves
infected before marriage and supposed that they were cured. Among men the
proportion of syphilitics who have been accidentally infected, though less
than among women, is still very considerable; it is stated to be at least
ten per cent., and possibly it is a much larger proportion of cases. The
scrupulous moralist who is anxious that all should have their deserts
cannot fail to be still more anxious to prevent the