SYPHILIS CAUSES FAMILY DISRUPTION 295 



And how many more in whicli the syphiUtic manifestation is 

 unimportant, being confined to a slight cutaneous outbreak ! The 

 patient imagines that all is well, that he is cured ; and, as a 

 matter of fact, all may go well for ten, fifteen, twenty, even 

 thirty, years, and then suddenly there is a formidable tertiary 

 expression, such as locomotor ataxy, or general paralysis, or 

 bhndness, or deafness, or some other equally grave complica- 

 tion. And the man thus struck down by misfortune may be a 

 model husband and father, whose family, unless they are for- 

 tunate enough to possess means of their own sufficient to live 

 upon without the work of the bread-winner, is reduced to beggary 

 and misery. This is no exaggerated statement. Syphih- 

 graphists and other medical men can cite thousands of such 

 cases known to them ; and we must remember that the family 

 conditions of hospital patients are not known to them, for in 

 the hospital it is solely the patient's malady which concerns the 

 doctor. We may conclude that if it often happens that patients 

 sufficiently well ofi to be nursed at home are thus led into shallows 

 and miseries, the amount of misery among those who are com- 

 pelled to go to hospital must be much larger still. Considered 

 from this point of view, syphilis must be reckoned a factor of 

 considerable importance in the causation of social misery ; and 

 those who are aware of the obstacles placed by economic misery 

 in the way of eugenic evolution cannot contemplate this influ- 

 ence of syphihs with optimism. 



Syphilis is thus a social danger because of the damage it does 

 to the individual, and because of its harmfulness to the life of 

 the family. But, looking at it as an agent in the etiology of 

 race degeneracy, there is a third social consequence of syphUis 

 which is more serious still ; and this consequence is to be sought 

 in the hereditary results of the disease, in the repercussion of the 

 syphiUtic afiection on the children and even on later genera- 

 tions. 



Professor Tarnowsky, of St. Petersburg, has recently published 



