MEDICAL SECTION 



words ante-natal hygiene when one or other or both 

 parents are suffering from syphilis ; there can be no 

 such thing as hygiene then. 



But if syphilis be the most potent of all the causes 

 of ante-natal death and disease, it is in connection 

 with it also that there comes the most hopeful outlook 

 for treatment, preventive and curative. The cause of 

 it, the Spirochata pallida, is among the most easily 

 recognized of microbes, and there is a blood test of 

 the presence of the disease which is reliable (the 

 Wassermann reaction) ; so the malady can be easily 

 diagnosed both after death and during life. Then, 

 again, there are medicines (such as mercury and 

 arsenic) which are effective in cutting short the 

 malady's dire course ; and these when given to the 

 expectant mother avail for the infected child in her 

 womb ; there is no kind of ante-natal treatment more 

 hopeful than that of syphilis of the unborn infant. 

 But these are not the only things which should be 

 and which may be done. With the triumphs of 

 preventive medicine all around us, with typhus prac- 

 tically unknown now, with typhoid fever checked, 

 with the sting taken out of diphtheria, with smallpo: 

 so rare as to be almost unseen by the present genen 

 tion of medical practitioners, with Malta fever banish 

 with the infected goats which harboured its caus 

 with tuberculosis giving way before the regimen 

 the open window with all these beneficent advanci 

 made or in the making, it is surely not beyond th< 

 wit of man to devise means for the prevention 

 syphilis. The greatest possible forward movemei 

 at the present time in ante-natal hygiene is the dete< 

 tion of syphilis and the prevention of its spread, 

 is even more important than the control of alcoholisi 

 So enormous are the advantages which will accn 

 from its eradication that it is not too much to hope fc 

 the time when every parent will demand from a pros 

 pective son-in-law a pre-nuptial certificate of go< 



