+The Public Attitude Toward Syphilis.+—­First of all, in order to understand the mental state of the patient, consider once more the attitude of the world at large toward the victim of syphilis.  A few who are frankly ignorant of the existence of the disease to start with are unprejudiced when approached in the right way.  But ninety-eight persons in a hundred who know that there is such a disease as syphilis are alive to the fact that it is considered a disgrace to have it, and to little else.  Such a feeling naturally chokes all but secret discussion of it.  Most of us remember the day when newspaper copy containing reference to tuberculosis did not find ready publication.  Syphilis is just crossing this same threshold into publicity.  It is now possible to get the name of the disease into print outside of medical works and to have it referred to in other ways than as “blood poisoning” in quack advertisements.  The mention of it in lectures on sex hygiene is an affair of the last twenty years, and the earlier discussions of the disease on such occasions were only too often vague, prejudiced, and inaccurate.  There are many who still believe, as did an old librarian whom I met in my effort to reach an important reference work on syphilis in a great public library.  “We used to keep them on the shelves,” he said, “until the high school boys began to get interested, and then we thought we would reserve the subject for the profession.”  Syphilis has been reserved for the profession for five hundred years and the disease has grown fat on it.  The lean times will come when a reasonable curiosity about syphilis can be satisfied without either shame or secrecy by a reasonable presentation of the facts.  We need the light on this subject and the light on reserved shelves is notoriously poor.  The stigma attaching to syphilis as a disease is one of the most tragic examples of a great wrong done to do a little right.  What if there are a few who deserve what they got?  We may well ask ourselves how free we are to cast the first stone.  And why single out syphilis as the badge of venery?  The “itch” is transmitted by sexual relations too.  Why not make the itch a sign of shame?  The power that has done the damage is not the intrinsic viciousness of syphilis, but the survival of the old idea of sexual taboo, the feeling that sex is a secret, shameful thing, essentially unclean.  To this age-old myth some one added the idea of punishment, and brutalized our conception of syphilis for centuries.  If there were a semblance of crude, stern justice in accepting syphilis as the divinely established punishment for sexual wrong-doing, protest would lose half its meaning.  Not only does syphilis fail to punish justly, but there is also something savage, akin almost to the mental attitude that makes “frightfulness” possible in war, in the belief that it is necessary to make headway against a sexual enemy by torturing, ruining, and dismembering men, women, and children,