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| Venereal Diseases |
Among all the diseases that weigh upon suffering humanity, there are probably none which are more extensively discussed by physicians, more dreaded by some, more frivolously regarded by others, and at the same time less definitely determined, with regard to their course and the boundaries of their various forms, than the diseases designated as venereal. According to Fallopius, Girtanner, Astruc, Hunter, Van Swieten, etc., among the older, or Carmichael, Bell, Cazenave, Biett, Baumes, and others, among recent physicians, there exists nothing more fearful and insidious in the world than these diseases. Fostered in the fatal bosom of a degrading passion, and conceived at a moment of burning lust, they scatter, according to some, silently and mysteriously their poisonous seed whose offspring, which, at its first appearance, is but lightly regarded and extirpated from the sphere of observation as speedily as possible by the criminal hand of indiscreet or ignorant physicians, nevertheless continues silently to unfold its manifold germs in the organism, until they break forth anew in a variety of different forms and thus announce to every eye the presence of the still raging malady. Again repressed by external means and again sprouting forth in other parts they penetrate, according to the assertions of observers, all the tissues of the patient, who, far from suspecting the enemy that is gnawing at his vital forces, very frequently sees one organ after the other invaded and destroyed, his face disfigured in the most horrible manner, his muscles and bones perforated, and his frame generally overwhelmed by the most horrid tortures without knowing how his distress can be alleviated were it only in a trifling degree. Whatever revolting and horrifying diseases are met with in large cities, in the huts of misery and in the gloomy abodes of vice: all those wretches who are covered with ugly scars and horrid ulcers; whose faces are disfigured by pustules and suppurating blotches; who are not unfrequently deprived of their noses and even eyes; who are emaciated to skeletons: whose livid and shrivelled skin is dangling around their fleshless bones; and who, spreading a pestilential fetor all around, wander about like half-rotten cadavers from the tombs, or who, removed from human society and avoided even by their own friends, are stretched upon the torture-bed of despair, praying for death as their greatest blessing: all these unfortunates, according to the common opinion of the greatest physicians, owe the whole sum of their sufferings to no other cause than to venereal infection, which, having been contracted in an unguarded moment, had been neglected, disregarded and afterwards mismanaged throughout. Yea, if these physicians are to be believed, a whole number of the most chronic and most incurable organic affections of various kinds, with which inhabitants of large cities are afflicted, emanate from this cause as their true fountain-head; their true character, unless they had reached the previously described fearful height, being almost always misapprehended, so that they are confounded with other less dangerous diseases, and the poison, even if, favored by peculiar circumstances, it should not break forth in actual disease in all cases, is transmitted to the children and entails upon them the distressing and irresistible processes of destruction from which the parents had luckily escaped. It is the opinion of the above-named physicians that these diseases contain a virus which, if once introduced into the organism, germinates unless previously neutralized by its specific antidote, and sprouts in the organism, after the fashion of parasitical growths, at the expence of its vital essence and strength, and continues so sprout until the body perishes by the poison. Where, according to the testimony of these physicians, nothing is done against these diseases than merely to obliterate their sprouting growths, the root remains in the organic tissues and may sprout forth again any time until life is annihilated by this murderous destroyer.