An Awful Plague | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 4, 1903

An Awful Plague.

An article in the California State Journal of Medicine presents some awful statements regarding diseases which come primarily from violation of sexual relations, but which would be unnameable here, did not the seriousness of the situation demand that false modesty should be set aside and the plain facts stated. The first of these diseases is syphilis, and the second is gonorrhea. It is said that one-eighth of all the patients in the New York hospitals suffer from these horrible diseases or their consequences; that from 60 to 80 per cent of the children born dead are due to the first; and that rickets are regarded as almost exclusively due to the same cause. Some authorities consider the second of these diseases as next to measles in its contagious characteristic. In some European cities three-fourths of the people are affected with the last named; and the greater number of cases of several diseases are due to these horrible maladies in the blood. Thirty thousand persons in Germany are sightless because of the last named. One-seventh of the population of Paris, one authority states, is afflicted with the first named, a plague said to be “twenty times more contagious than tuberculosis, and almost as severe in its ravages.” Over 53 per cent of the British army in India are afflicted with the latter, while 75 per cent of the first contingent of the soldiers leaving for the Philippines through San Francisco were suffering from these plagues. And the writer of the article, an eminent physician, well declares: “The above facts [of which we have not given all] prove the conditions to be truly appalling.” In their responsibility for the loss of life, these horrible diseases stand second to the great white plague, tuberculosis. These awful facts are, to a great extent, a measure of morality (or immorality) in men; but there are thousands of innocent wives and children, who, through contagion and inheritance, suffer because of the vices of others.