especially newborn children, is one of the principal causes of
blindness. Gonorrhea may be transmitted to little girls innocently
from infected toilet seats, and is all but incurable. Gonorrhea,
wherever it occurs, is an obstinate, treacherous, and resistant
disease, one of the most serious of modern medical problems, and
fully deserves a place as the fourth great plague.

Chancroid is an infectious ulcer of the genitals, local in
character, not affecting the body as a whole, but sometimes
destroying considerable portions of the parts involved.

Let us think of syphilis, then, as a serious but by no means hopeless
constitutional disease. Dismiss chancroid as a relatively insignificant
local affair, seldom a serious problem under a physician's care.
Separate syphilis from gonorrhea for the reason that gonorrhea is a
problem in itself. Against its train of misfortune to innocence and
guilt alike, we are as yet not nearly so well equipped to secure
results. Against syphilis, the astonishing progress of our knowledge in
the past ten years has armed us for triumph. When the fight against
tuberculosis was brought to public attention, we were not half so well
equipped to down the disease as we are today to down syphilis. For
syphilis we now have reliable and practical methods of prevention, which
have already proved their worth. The most powerful and efficient of
drugs is available for the cure of the disease in its earlier stages,
and early recognition is made possible by methods whose reliability is
among the remarkable achievements of medicine. It is the sound opinion
of conservative men that if the knowledge now in the hands of the
medical profession could be put to wide-spread use, syphilis would
dwindle in two generations from the unenviable position of the third
great plague to the insignificance of malaria and yellow fever on the