not deserve any interest as a
drama. With complete sincerity the theatre programme announces, "The
object of this play is a study of the disease of syphilis in its
bearing on marriage." The play was first produced in Paris in the year
1901. It began its great medical teaching in America in the spring of
1913. Even those who have only superficial contact with medicine know
that the twelve years which lie between those dates have seen the
greatest progress in the study of syphilis which has ever been made.
It is sufficient to think of the Wassermann test, the Ehrlich
treatment, the new discoveries concerning the relations of lues and
brain disease, and many other details in order to understand that a
clinical lesson about this disease written in the first year of the
century must be utterly antiquated in its fourteenth year. We might
just as well teach the fighting of tuberculosis with the clinical
textbook of thirty years ago.

How misleading many of the claims of the play are ought to have struck
even the unscientific audience. The real centre of the so-called drama
is that the father and the grandmother of the diseased infant are
willing to risk the health of the wet nurse rather than to allow the
child to go over to artificial feeding. The whole play loses its chief
point and its greatest pathetic speech if we do not accept the
Parisian view that a sickly child must die if it has its milk from the
bottle. The Boston audience wildly applauded the great speech of the
grandmother who wants to poison the nurse rather than to sacrifice her
grandchild to the drinking of sterilized milk, and yet it was an
audience which surely was brought up on the bottle. It would be very
easy to write another play in which quite different medical views are
presented, and where will it lead us if the various treatments of
tuberculosis, perhaps by the Friedmann cures, or of diphtheria,
perhaps by chiropractice or osteopathy, are to be fought out on the
stage until finally the editors of _Life_ would write a play around
their usual thesis that the physicians are destroying mankind and that
our modern medicine is humbug. As long as the drama shows us human
elements, every one can be a party and can take a stand for the
motives of his heart. But if the stage presents arguments on
scientific questions in which no public is able to examine the facts,
the way is open for any one-sided propaganda.

Moreover, what, after all, are the lessons whic