Syphilis as a Social Problem


The simple device of talking plain, matter-of-fact English about a thing
has a value that we are growing to appreciate more and more every day.
It is only too easy for an undercurrent of ill to make headway under
cover of a false name, a false silence, or misleading speech. The fact
that syphilis is a disease spread to a considerable extent by sexual
relations too often forces us into an attitude of veiled insinuation
about it, a mistaken delicacy which easily becomes prudish and
insincere. It is a direct move in favor of vulgar thinking to misname
anything which involves the intimacies of life, or to do other than look
it squarely in the eye, when necessity demands, without shuffling or
equivocation. On this principle it is worth while to meet the problem of
a disease like syphilis with an open countenance and straightforward
honesty of expression. It puts firm ground under our feet to talk about
it in the impersonal way in which we talk about colds and pneumonia and
bunions and rheumatism, as unfortunate, but not necessarily indecent,
facts in human experience. Nothing in the past has done so much for the
campaign against consumption as the unloosing of tongues. There is only
one way to understand syphilis, and that is to give it impartial,
discriminating discussion as an issue which concerns the general
health. To color it up and hang it in a gallery of horrors, or to befog
it with verbal turnings and twistings, are equally serious mistakes. The
simple facts of syphilis can appeal to intelligent men and women as
worthy of their most serious attention, without either stunning or
disgusting them. It is in the unpretentious spirit of talking about a
spade as a spade, and not as "an agricultural implement for the
trituration of the soil," that we should take stock of the situation and