292 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



which necessarily forms the basis of all social life beyond the 

 primitive stage, syphilis presents a social danger from three 

 points of view : contamination of the wife, dissolution of the 

 marriage, and material ruin of the family through the physical 

 or intellectual incapacity of its bread-winner following as a 

 consequence of syphilis. 



Here are three points which it is important to note when we 

 consider syphilis as a factor of racial degeneracy. And these 

 cases are not few and far between. Professor Fournier, in an 

 important document communicated to the French Academy of 

 Medicine twenty years ago,^ declared that, as a result of personal 

 observation and of prolonged investigation, he found that an 

 average of 20 per cent, of the women infected by syphilis were 

 infected during their married life by their husbands. Thus, 

 one woman out of every five who have been syphilitically in- 

 fected is an innocent woman who has contracted the disease, 

 with all its attendant risks and perils, from her husband during 

 their married life ! These figures prove sufficiently that syphilis 

 is not the monopoly of the prostitute and irregular class ; but 

 that no fewer than 20 per cent, of sj^hilitic patients among 

 women, on an average, are honest married women who are thus 

 tainted through no fault of their own. Comparative statistics 

 as to syphilis are impossible to obtain — at all events, rehable 

 statistics — but there is every reason to suppose the average 

 amount of syphilis to be very similar in all civilised countries ; 

 and if, in Paris, different researches have shown that from 

 19 to 23 per cent, of syphilitic women are infected by their 

 husbands, there is no reason for supposing the figures to be 

 appreciably different in London, Berlin, Vienna, Brussels, 

 St. Petersburg, or^any other great European city. 



The investigations carried out by Professor Fournier as to 

 the sources of syphilitic infection in women give us indeed a 



1 A. Fournier, Docwment statistique sur les Sources de la Syphilis chez la 

 Femme, in Bulletin de VAcademie de Medecine. Paris, October, 1887. 



