[226] “That syphilis has been, and is, one of the chief causes of physical degeneration in England cannot be denied, and it is a fact that is acknowledged on all sides,” writes Lieutenant-Colonel Lambkin, the medical officer in command of the London Military Hospital for Venereal Diseases.  “To grapple with the treatment of syphilis among the civil population of England ought to be the chief object of those interested in that most burning question, the physical degeneration of our race” (British Medical Journal, August 19, 1905).

[227] F.W.  Mott, “Syphilis as a Cause of Insanity,” British Medical Journal, October 18, 1902.

[228] It can seldom be proved in more than eighty per cent. of cases, but in twenty per cent. of old syphilitic cases it is commonly impossible to find traces of the disease or to obtain a history of it.  Crocker found that it was only in eighty per cent. of cases of absolutely certain syphilitic skin diseases that he could obtain a history of syphilitic infection, and Mott found exactly the same percentage in absolutely certain syphilitic lesions of the brain; Mott believes (e.g., “Syphilis in Relation to the Nervous System,” British Medical Journal, January 4, 1908) that syphilis is the essential cause of general paralysis and tabes.

[229] Audry. La Semaine Medicale, June 26, 1907.  When Europeans carry syphilis to lands inhabited by people of lower race, the results are often very much worse than this.  Thus Lambkin, as a result of a special mission to investigate syphilis in Uganda, found that in some districts as many as ninety per cent, of the people suffer from syphilis, and fifty to sixty per cent, of the infant mortality is due to this cause.  These people are Baganda, a highly intelligent, powerful, and well-organized tribe before they received, in the gift of syphilis, the full benefit of civilization and Christianity, which (Lambkin points out) has been largely the cause of the spread of the disease by breaking down social customs and emancipating the women.  Christianity is powerful enough to break down the old morality, but not powerful enough to build up a new morality (British Medical Journal, October 3, 1908, p. 1037).

[230] Even within the limits of the English army it is found In India (H.C.  French, Syphilis in the Army, 1907) that venereal disease is ten times more frequent among British troops than among Native troops.  Outside of national armies it is found, by admission to hospital and death rates, that the United States stands far away at the head for frequency of venereal disease, being followed by Great Britain, then France and Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany.

[231] There is no dispute concerning the antiquity of gonorrhoea in the Old World as there is regarding syphilis.  The disease was certainly known at a very remote period.  Even Esarhaddon, the famous King of Assyria, referred to in the Old Testament, was treated by the priests for a disorder which, as described in the cuneiform documents of the time, could only have been gonorrhoea.  The disease was also well known to the ancient Egyptians, and evidently common, for they recorded many prescriptions for its treatment (Oefele, “Gonorrhoe 1350 vor Christi Geburt,” Monatshefte fuer Praktische Dermatologie, 1899, p. 260).