174 THE NEXT GENERATION 



" One day," writes Dr. Howard, " I was called to see her, 

 stretched on a bed, with pus-swollen eyes, crying from lacer- 

 ating pains, feverish, and frightened. There was no pos- 

 sible help for her ; it was too late ; her eyes had already been 

 destroyed. Two days before I had been called in to see her, 

 she had felt a little inflammation and, not having the slightest 

 idea what the trouble was, kept wiping the pus away with a 

 handkerchief. Of course the child slept with its mother. It 

 is a simple matter of unknown detail just how the pus was 

 transferred to the child's eyes, but it was, because on this 

 day the pus was penetrating the tissues, and the lenses could 

 not be saved. Mother and child blind for life ! And this 

 mother," as Dr. Howard exclaims, " had been sent out into 

 the world with a high-school diploma ! Educated ! Oh, it is 

 pitiable, pitiable ; it makes the physician's blood boil to write 

 or think of these thousands of cases that could have been 

 saved had our parents, teachers, ministers, done their duty." 



The woman herself did not know that from sheets, towels, 

 etc. disease microbes might reach her hands, and that those 

 hands should have been washed before they so much as 

 touched her eyes. 



Every blind asylum in every state and city bears testimony 

 to the power of this microbe. In 1 890 there were over 50,000 

 persons in the United States who were totally blind, with 

 about as many more who were partially blind, and it is esti- 

 mated that over one quarter of the number were made blind 

 because these gonococcus microbes entered their eyes at birth 

 and so scarred the conjunctiva and the cornea that light could 

 not pass through to the retina. In every such case the result 

 is blindness. 



Dr. Neisser says that in Germany 30,000 people are 

 blind through this disease alone. It is also shown that fully 



