temporarily out of sight, create a false sense of security, and leave the disease to proceed quietly below the surface, to the undoing of its victim.  Such patients get an entirely false idea of their condition, and may refuse to believe that they are not really cured, or may have no occasion even to wonder whether they are or not until they are beyond help.  Every statement that can be made about the danger of syphilis to the public health applies with full force to the symptomatically treated early case.  Trifling relapses, highly contagious sores in the mouth, or elsewhere, are not prevented by symptomatic treatment and pass unnoticed the more readily because the patient feels himself secure in what has been done for him.  In the first five years of an inefficiently treated infection, and sometimes longer, this danger is a very near and terrible one, to which thousands fall victims every year, and among them, perhaps, some of your friends and mine.  Dangerous syphilis is imperfectly treated syphilis, and at any moment it may confront us in our drawing rooms, in the swimming pool, across the counter of the store, or in the milkman, the waitress, the barber.  It confronts thousands of wives and children in the person of half-cured fathers, infected nurse-maids, and others intimately associated with their personal life.  These dangers can be effectively removed from our midst by the substitution of radical for symptomatic methods and ideals of cure.  A person under vigorous treatment with a view to radical cure, with the observation of his condition by a physician which that implies, is nearly harmless.  In a reasonable time he can be made fit even for marriage.  The whole contagious period of syphilis would lose its contagiousness if every patient and physician refused to think of anything but radical cure.

In such a demand as this for the highest ideals in the treatment of a disease like syphilis, the medical profession must, of course, stand prepared to do its share toward securing the best results.  No one concedes more freely than the physician himself that, in the recognition and radical treatment of syphilis, not all the members of the medical profession are abreast of the most advanced knowledge of the subject.  Syphilis, almost up to the present day, has never been adequately taught as part of a medical training.  Those who obtained a smattering of knowledge about it from half a dozen sources in their school days were fortunate.  Thorough knowledge of the disease, of the infinite variety of its forms, of the surest means of recognizing it, and the best methods of treating it, is only beginning to be available for medical students at the hands of expert teachers of the subject.  The profession, by the great advances in the medical teaching of syphilis in the past ten years, and the greater advances yet to come, is, however, doing its best to meet its share of responsibility in preparation for a successful campaign.  The combination of the physician who insists on curing syphilis, with the patient who insists on being cured, may well be irresistible.