ity
are affected with syphilis." According to Rohe, on this basis Gihon
estimates the number of syphilitics in the United States at one time as
2,000,000.

To-day no disease, except possibly tuberculosis, is a greater agency in
augmenting the general mortality and furthering sickness than syphilis.
Its hereditary features, the numerous ways in which it may be
communicated outside of the performance of the sexual act, and the
careful way in which it is kept from the sanitary authorities render it
a scourge which, at the present day, we seem to have no method of
successfully repressing.

Modern Mortality from Infectious Diseases.--As to the direct influence
on the mortality of the most common infectious diseases of the present
day, tuberculosis, universally prevalent, is invariably in the lead. No
race or geographic situation is exempt from it. Osler mentions that in
the Blood Indian Reserve of the Canadian Northwest Territories, during
six years, among a population of about 2000 there were 127 deaths from
pulmonary consumption. This enormous death-rate, it is to be
remembered, occurred in a tribe occupying one of the finest climates of
the world, among the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a region in
which consumption is extremely rare among the white population, and in
which cases of tuberculosis from the Eastern provinces do remarkably
well. Mayo-Smith quotes a table illustrating the annual deaths (based
on the returns from 1887 to 1891) from certain infectious diseases per
10,000 European inhabitants. The figures for each disease give a rough
measure of its prevalence in different countries. The large figures as
to small-pox show the absence in Italy and "Hieronymi Fracastorii,"
Veronae, 1530. Statistics and Sociology, New York, 1885.

Austria of vaccination; diphtheria seems to be very fatal in Germany
and Austria; Italy has a large rate for typhoid fever, and the same is
true of the other fevers; France, Germany, and Austria show a very
large rate for tuberculosis, while Italy has a small rate.

DEATHS FROM CERTAIN DISEASES PER 10,000 INHABITANTS.

Small- Scarlet Diphtheria Typhoid Tuber-
COUNTRY. pox. Measles. fever fever. culosis

Italy, . . . . . 3.86 6.17 2.99 6.08 7.49 13.61
France (cities). 2.3 5.18 3.1 6.66 5.32 33.
England, . . . . 0.11 4.68 2.31 1.74 1.9 16.09
Ireland, . . . . 0.01