Isthmus of Panama. The influences that stand between humanity and this
achievement are the lack of general public enlightenment on the disease
itself, and public confusion of the problem with other sex issues for
which no such clean-cut, satisfactory solution has been found. Think of
syphilis as the wages of sin, as well-earned disgrace, as filth, as the
badge of immorality, as a necessary defense against the loathesomeness
of promiscuity, as a fearful warning against prostitution, and our
advantage slips from us. The disease continues to spread wholesale
disaster and degeneration while we wrangle over issues that were old
when history began and are progressing with desperate slowness to a
solution probably many centuries distant. Think of syphilis as a medical
and a sanitary problem, and its last line of defense crumbles before our
attack. It can and should be blotted out.

+Syphilis, a Problem of Public Health Rather than of Morals.+--Nothing
that can be said about syphilis need make us forget the importance of
moral issues. The fact which so persistently distorts our point of view,
that it is so largely associated with our sexual life, is probably a
mere incident, biologically speaking, due in no small part to the almost
absurdly simple circumstance that the germ of the disease cannot grow in
the presence of air, and must therefore find refuge, in most cases, in
the cavities and inlets from the surface of the body. History affords
little support to the lingering belief that if syphilis is done away
with, licentiousness will overrun the world. Long before syphilis
appeared in Europe there was sexual immorality. In the five centuries in
which it has had free play over the civilized world, the most optimistic
cannot successfully maintain that it has materially bettered conditions
or acted as a check on loose morals, though its relation to sexual
intercourse has been known. As a morals policeman, syphilis can be
obliterated without material loss to the cause of sexual self-restraint,