258 PLAIN FACTS FOR OLD AND YOUNG 



There is probably no country in which the provi- 

 sions of this Contagious Disease Act have been so thor- 

 oughly carried out as in Germany; nevertheless, the 

 commission appointed by the Society of Medicine, of 

 Berlin, with Professor Virchow as president, recently 

 reported as the result of an investigation, that both 

 prostitution and venereal diseases were found to be 

 rapidly increasing in Berlin. For example, the number 

 of regular prostitutes, recognized as such by the police, 

 was, in 1886, 3,006. The number had increased in 1891 

 to 4,364, an increase of almost fifty per cent. This rep- 

 resents, however, but a small proportion of the women 

 actually engaged in prostitution, as 16,000 women are 

 annually arrested for plying their vocation upon the 

 streets in Berlin, and it is known that a great number 

 of women lead lives of prostitution clandestinely; so 

 the committee estimate the total number of prostitutes 

 in Berlin at 40,000 to 50,000. 



Some idea of the number of persons who are annu- 

 ally infected by venereal disease may be gained from 

 the fact that the committee reported nearly 80,000 cases 

 as having been treated at two hospitals alone, in Berlin, 

 between 1880 and 1889. The fact was also mentioned 

 by the committee, that a great number of cases were 

 doubtless not included in this category. They quote 

 the estimate of Blaschko, that one in every nine or ten 

 of the male population of Berlin has been infected with 

 syphilis. 



A most convincing evidence of the utter inefficiency 

 of the inspection service in preventing the spread of 

 venereal diseases, was shown by the fact developed by 

 the committee, that the naked eye inspection which has 

 been universally relied upon, detects less than one in 

 five of the cases of gonorrhea, to say nothing of syphi- 



