ence has still been
committed if a husband contaminates his wife, or a wife her husband.[249]
The "freedom" enjoyed in this matter by England and the United States is
well illustrated by an American case quoted by Dr. Isidore Dyer, of New
Orleans, in his report to the Brussels Conference on the Prevention of
Venereal Diseases, in 1899: "A patient with primary syphilis refused even
charitable treatment and carried a book wherein she kept the number of men
she had inoculated. When I first saw her she declared the number had
reached two hundred and nineteen and that she would not be treated until
she had had revenge on five hundred men." In a community where the most
elementary rules of justice prevailed facilities would exist to enable
this woman to obtain damages from the man who had injured her or even to
secure his conviction to a term of imprisonment. In obtaining some
indemnity for the wrong done her, and securing the "revenge" she craved,
she would at the same time have conferred a benefit on society. She is
shut out from any action against the one person who injured her; but as a
sort of compensation she is allowed to become a radiating focus of
disease, to shorten many lives, to cause many deaths, to pile up
incalculable damages; and in so doing she is to-day perfectly within her
legal rights. A community which encourages this state of things is not
only immoral but stupid.

There seems, however, to be a growing body of influential opinion, both in
England and in the United States, in favor of making the transmission of
venereal disease an offence punishable by heavy fine or by
imprisonment.[250] In any enactment no stress should be put on the
infection being conveyed "knowingly." Any formal limitation of this kind
is unnecessary, as in such a case the Court always takes into account the
offender's ignorance or mere negligence, and it is mischievous because it
tends to render an enactment ineffective and to put a premium on
ignorance; the husbands who infect their wives with gonorrhoea
immediately after marriage have usually done so from ignorance, and it
should be at least necessary for them to prove that they have been
fortified in their ignorance by medical advice. It is sometimes said that
the existing law could be utilized for bringing actions of this kind, and
that no greater facilities should be offered for fear of increasing
attempts at blackmail. The inutility of the law at present for this
purpose is sho