Plain facts on sex hygiene

Contents

Tue Conpitions THAT Menace Homes AND CHILDREN ; is ; ; a:

How tue Disrtast Is ContTRACTED BY THE INNOCENT a : é 2 ‘ ‘

Sypuitis: Irs ConrTaGIoUSNEss. Its Dancer To You . , :

Foreword

For a man who has seen thousands of his fellow-men and those who are dear to them, suffering from physical diseases which they may pass on to an innocent wife, or child, or leaving the germs where the most unsuspecting girl or boy may become infected, there is but one thing for him to do: Speak in terms that can be understood by all old enough to read.

When a man knows the causes of ruined homes, of the thousands of little blind babies, of the birth of unfits, and knows also that these conditions are increasing at a fearful rate, his duty is to speak. While moral and educational forces are trying to solve the causes of increase of crime, alcoholism, insanity, moral perversion, and through lack of information regarding the real roots of much of the social degeneracy, are unable to check it all, then one who knows should not hesitate for fear of misunderstanding or the criticisms of the ignorant prudes.

The fearful havoc the diseases explained in this book are making among the innocent, is due to ignorance.

It is my purpose in this book to destroy forever this injurious ignorance. This is the only

ill iv FOREWORD way to stop the increase of the curse that is over all the land.

This desire to save the future men and women of our land is the reason, and the only reason, for this book.

Witi1am LEE Howarp, M.D.

June, 1910.

Chapter I The Conditions That Menace Homes And Children

NEARLY two thousand years ago the famous Greco-Roman doctor, Galen, wrote: “ It is better to give a clear description than to fall back on miserable barbarous names, which physicians have invented with great plenty . . . the true searcher after truth must needs withdraw his attention from the nomenclature that has grown up, and fix his eyes on actual facts.”

I shall follow the old physician’s advice in the following pages.

The source of all the social diseases that now menace our homes and the future health of the nation, is, of course, to be found in prostitution; professional and clandestine; especially in the latter. If the diseases and their effects were confined solely to the sources; to the prostitutes and those who associate with them, it would not be necessary to advise or instruct our wives, daughters and sons—and fathers. If the brainand body-destroying plague confined its ravages only to those who “ follow her whose footsteps take hold on hell,’ the whole subject could be confined to teachers, physicians and ministers; these men to use their professional and moral influence on the men who through untrained impulses and ignorance of the dangers to themselves, rush in where the wise man fears to enter. .

But even so; we should have to train and educate both teachers and ministers; for of all men these latter are the most ignorant of the REAL facts; of the indirect and hereditary effects that are the curse of venereal diseases. And strange as it may appear, not all physicians have that full knowledge of these conditions that the public has a right to expect them to possess. This deplorable fact is the cause of much avoidable misery, of the reason for so many early deaths and suicides.

The fountain source of venereal diseases has overflowed. The contaminated waters are rushing rapidly toward helpless children, to homes whose doors are open to receive the flood, into schoolhouses, and wherever its running and oozing slime can penetrate.

Hence it is necessary to ery out loud to the people that the dam has broken and the putrid waters are rushing toward them bringing disease, crime, insanity and death to those who will not heed the warning and take means to let the plague pass on, walled in safe channels where it may be retained.

No simple warning or hints have been effective up to the present time; the curse rolls over the land throwing its mephitic breath into innocent and helpless nostrils. The real dangers have not been forcibly put before the public; if they had, many of the living deaths we daily see would have vanished, or at least, we would not have allowed these walking plagues to reproduce their leprous states and fill our asylums and hospitals to overflowing.

All venereal diseases instead of being mere temporary effects of immoral living, of accidents due to ignorance, in reality bring life-long misery and pEaTH. Yes; many deaths are directly and indirectly the effect of these diseases.

Statistics are never absolute facts under the conditions that exist in the venereal peril. They are impossible of exact verification; and as the individuals suffering from either the direct, indirect or inherited effects are secretive and lying, or else totally ignorant of the real trouble and its consequences, we can, as physicians, only give approximate figures derived from experience. 7

It is estimated that over EIGHT MILLIONS of people in the United States are to-day suffering from the direct or indirect effects of vene-— real diseases; that in New York City there are’ eleven hundred and fifty thousand men and women—not to mention the little girls of five and ten years of age—carrying around the fearfully contagious germs of gonorrhea and syphilis.

If one man was found upon the streets with ° smallpox germs on his. clothes or in his body, he would be immediately arrested and confined in a pesthouse. If two sailors land in the city with the germs of yellow fever, or a leper is discovered, the press throughout the land announces the facts in big headlines, and all the doctors and quarantine officials are on the search for their tracks.

The people have been instructed in the dangers of these contagious diseases; they know of their fearful ravages; they fear, take precautions and lock their doors against the entrance of the germs.

Yet we have hourly, daily, two diseases from one source in our land that, compared with these rare ones of yellow fever and leprosy, is a MIL- LION TO ONE. The great White Plague is a mere incident as compared to the GREAT BLACK PLAGUE—Syphilis, and its twin sister, gonorrhea.

We do not fear to any great extent the first symptoms of consumption; we know its cause and the remedy. Through a national campaign of instruction and disseminating knowledge where it reaches schools, churches, homes and families, we are on the way of totally eradicating the White Plague.

By the same method of instructing the people of the land as to the contagiousness and universality of the Black Plague, its dangers can be reduced to a minimum; our children no longer be in danger of being born blind, our asylums for the mentally afflicted reduced in numbers, much crime prevented, and those sudden and early deaths of men hindered. And the many apparently unaccountable suicides of women? Yes.

The horrible and distressing operations upon innocent wives, the increasing sterility of married people can be explained and avoided, the ruin of many innocent boys and girls who come in contact with the germs scattered around them can be stopped.

It is not possible that the diseases can be driven from the land as can consumption; any such impression or idea belongs to the Utopian, the library dreamer or to the woman who is totally blind to the world as it is, always has been and in our day always will be.

The conditions that are the source of these diseases will always be with us—at least as long as man and woman are what they are— but they can be confined to those who deliberately run the risk of contracting them. ,Knowl-\ edge can be so widely spread that a woman will | hesitate or refuse to marry a diseased man or one who has ever been diseased. The germs can be kept out ef public places, from schools, from homes. Prostitution can be so regulated that it must keep its poisonous fangs in its own dens; then let him enter who will.

It has been the prevailing idea that the sources of immorality and the consequent diseases were focused in the large cities. If this were so, the problem of handling the diseases and controlling them could be readily solved. But the fact is, that it is in the country towns and villages; in the hotels employing waitresses, the summer hotels with their large number of girls out for a good time and money; in the country girls themselves, that the Black Plague spreads and gets beyond our control. Here is where much of the danger lies, because on account of the dense ignorance concerning the diseases, these girls and women do not seek medical aid until it is too late, and not until after they have infected scores of men and boys. These men and boys, being almost equally ignorant, give their money to the charlatans, quacks and druggists whose advertisements fill the pages of the country papers next to reading matter whose headline is probably, “ Bible Lessons for Next Sunday.”

Under such commercial and false treatment the individual is NOT—NEVER, CURED. External signs are suppressed, and if they are suppressed for three years or more the man forgets all about “his little trouble.” Then he marries a pure girl. After a few years of married life, during which she has to be constantly under the care of the village doctor, she is looked upon with suspicion by all those female serpents found in every small town, the gossips, who accuse her of being unwomanly, practicing evil things and a practical advocate of “race suicide.”

She is not sterile; or was not when she married; her husband is sterile, and the hidden germs which cause his sterility have invaded her reproductive organs. So she finally goes to the hospital for a mutilating operation, returns disheartened, will-less, and is finally put down as a drug victim—one of those thousands found throughout New England, where millions of bottles of “ tonics and womb restorers ”’ are sold, and which are simply sugared decoctions of alcohol, morphine, chloral or some form of cocaine.

Here is a physician’s report to the Vermont State Medical Society (Dr. Wm. Warren Townsend). I give it as reported in a medical journal, with the exception of a few words which I turn into lay language. The doctor related his experience with an epidemic of syphilis in a Vermont village of two thousand inhabitants. He traced the epidemic to two young women who visited Burlington; while there they met some soldier boys who had returned from service in the Philippines. They accepted the attentions of many of them, and returned to their homes flushed with the enthusiasm of the good time they had had and in due course of time became flushed with the skin eruption and other signs of venereal disease. When examined they were found to be suffering from the secondary symptoms of syphilis. In other words, the poison had been allowed to penetrate their whole system, and what at first might have prevented the ruin of many boys and men and saved the girls was now a fixed, destroying scourge. _ Through their ignorance of the fearful contagiousness and body-eating processes of syphilis, they still went on in promiscuous intercourse. It is not to be wondered that they infected all their partners, until, as stated, syphilis became epidemic in the village.

The doctor personally had under treatment sixteen cases of syphilis, traceable to these two women, and had seen in consultation as many more; the physicians located in the village were treating a number, while others were taking advertised cures.

Of course, where there is such an epidemic, cases of innocently acquired syphilis are almost sure to occur. How many innocent cases will ultimately be the result, no man can tell. Here is one that the doctor reports.

A man, a husband and father, “went out with the boys,” as he expressed it, and after drinking heavily—it was a temperance town— wound up a night’s debauch by cohabiting with one of these women. In due time he found a little sore and went to a quack, who did not know what the real trouble was. He made a wrong diagnosis, of course misleading the man, and the harsh treatment healed up all the ovut- WARD signs of disease. But about the time this false treatment was going on, mucous patches appeared in the mouth. Not much importance was attached to them by the medical(?) attendant or patient, so he had no warning of their infective character, and hence had no hesitation in kissing and fondling, as was his custom, his four-year-old baby girl, with the result that, when Dr. Townsend saw the child, it presented a typical syphilitic sore of the lip. The child had contracted a virulent disease; it will probably be ruined for life. Just what will be its future only time can show. However, its chances of developing one of the many afflictions that syphilis is accountable for, are ten to one.

As I have stated, this book does not point out morals or preach; it only gives facts; these will forcibly point out all the morals necessary.

It would not be necessary to go into these unpleasant details if the public had any realization of the dangerous universality of the plague. » When I state that eight out of every ten young ' men from sixteen to thirty years of age are suffering from either the direct or indirect effects of venereal diseases, that thirty-five per cent. of these cases will bring man, wife, children or grandchildren to hospitals, asylums or _ early graves, it is absolutely necessary to speak \eee and convincingly.

~Kivery woman or girl who sells or freely offers herself to man is certain: to contract one of the two venereal diseases. It makes no difference whether she is a clandestine prostitute, a passionate “occasional” or a_ professional harlot. So sure are the wages of sin that avoidance of the punishment is not possible.

I have stated that over a million people in New York are suffering in one form or other from venereal diseases. Over two hundred thousand are syphilitic, while the balance carry around with them the germs of gonorrhea. Matters are not much better in other large cities. Under these conditions how can any home be free from the danger; how many are really free from the curse of the plague?

The curse falls more rapidly and injuriously upon the youth and young man, for a prostitute, even though she be in that latent state of the | ‘disease that hardened old customers will escape her venomous germs, will surely infect the virgin soil of the adolescent. Every prostitute, and others, who promiscuously offers her body, suffers from chronic inflammation; and although an examination may prove negative, still she can and does infect the youth of delicate tissues.

And just here enters a fact of vital importance. She may believe that she is cured, has been discharged by her doctor as free from infection, yet so difficult is it to be positive regarding a cure in a woman, that danger always remains in her. Under even these apparently safe conditions she poEs infect the young man. Such a woman will infect many young men in > a day, and of the thousands of ignorant and eareless young girls who clandestinely carry | on prostitution, they are up in the hundreds of/ thousands. These are the greatest foci of venereal infection. ;

The ignorant man of the street and the youth who thinks that he must “sow his wild oats,” have been accustomed to look upon these diseases in a light manner. To the physician who knows and fully realizes their ultimate effects upon individual and nation, comes a feeling of horror and fear for the future. There is no escape from the plague to those who will indulge in illegitimate intercourse. At all times two out of every four available women are suffering from the activity of the virulent poisons— ALL are suffering from the effects of the diseases at all times.

_ The young men of to-day are not so evil as they are ignorant. Social conditions have been antagonistic to right thinking and knowledge. Even boys.of fourteen years of age have opportunities in the mixed schools to become sexually aroused and start them on a career that ends up with a ruinous infection.

And who is to blame for this antisocial con- ‘dition? Society; that mental and moral twist

_ that keeps the sexes among animals separated \and watched while we allow the young human /animals to promiscuously mix without warning, instruction or watchfulness.

Here is a case in point: it also shows how the venereal diseases can even get into a small primary school, infect the innocent and ignorant and make of chastity and right living a mock and butt for ridicule. :

Some four years ago, at the request of the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, I opened this matter so that the mothers of the land could understand. It was, of course, done in a delicate manner but broad enough to be understood by those of mature and maternal minds. A few days after the article appeared

I met a man in a small New Hampshire town, who said to me: “ Well, Dr. Howard, you’d better keep away from my house. The wife’s got it in for you.”

‘What for?”

“Your article—she flung the paper into the fire and said she would no longer allow the “nasty thing or man who wrote it, into her house.’ ”

Now this man had two daughters; one eight years and the other ten years of age. He admitted to me that I was right, that he had tried to talk to his wife, to get her to commence teaching the girls about their bodies, how to take care of them and make them ready for their development.

“You mean to say,” I asked him, “ that she will not give them their birthright—to know themselves; what woman is, what she should be; what chastity means to a girl?”

“ Sure thing; she raises with me because I mentioned the matter. She’s boss in the house. I know that it should be done. I know it—but what can I do?”

This girl is now fourteen years of age. Allowed to run around without care or instruction in sexual matters she soon picked up vicious knowledge, looked with morbid glee at the obscene pictures that older girls and boys passed around, and of course developed early. And this latter state without a word from her mother! By this time daughter and mother were widely apart as far as confidential relations went.

The girl gave herself freely to the boys in the school; boys and developing adolescents. But she progressed in her desires and now is a little strumpet, associating with grown men. These men are of the morally irresponsible type; coarse, vulgar, vicious. I know one of them frequents houses of prostitution. Now cannot you see that it is only a matter of days before - this girl goes to school carrying a venereal disease which will progress to a fatal malady? By this time many boys will become infected; the girl will use the common drinking cup at school; some little child will drink from that cup and soon sores will appear upon her innocent lips. These will be treated as “cold sores” until the fatal disease is rotting her body, then the doctor will be called, and in his sorrowing heart he will say: “'Too late, too late! Poor little child; killed, yes, worse than murdered, by the false prudery of this nation!”

Four years before this these mothers had the truths put plainly before them—they would not heed the warnings. I am pleased to say that not all mothers have been so criminally negligent. But there are millions yet to learn.

Chapter II What Are These Diseases?

OnE hears in academic and social circles the reiterated statement that the publicity of any matters connected with sex relations, social evils and the consequent diseases, will arouse ‘“ morbid curiosity ”; therefore, such subjects should not be given any publicity. We must not men- | tion any matters connected with sex development to our youths and young women for fear of arousing this fetish; “morbid curiosity,” say the scholastics, the narrow-minded and the ignorant—for one who is not familiar with his or her own sex physiologic growth and development Is ignorant.

Morbid curiosity? Nothing of the kind. There is no more natural or normal curiosity than the one to know self and how that self develops. It is the gradual moral and mental development of man or woman to want to know the truths; and these truths coming to them gradually and keeping in harmony with the physical growth, makes for health, morals and lasting reverence for God and His wonderful methods.

Morbid curiosity is only aroused where the youth or girl has been kept in ignorance of God’s laws; when they have been denied that right to know themselves which is the right of every born child; when they have been told never to peer behind the curtain where lies the open book of life; when they have been deceived, told untruths and allowed to wallow in these untruths. Keeping our sons and daughters from the real truths shunts them off to those who teach the untruths. In this method lies the origin of all morbid curiosity.

So away with this harmful fetish of “ morbid curiosity,” which is always a symptom of evil thinking; never of right knowledge.

There can be no evil in God’s laws. Those who teach so deny the Divine power that gives us life and thought. Such statements that teaching the youths and girls of our land how they came upon earth, how immoral living is certain to bring disease, insanity to themselves and those who follow them, is wrong’ teaching— comes from ignorant sources. Those who object to telling our people how honeycombed this country is with venereal diseases, with the rotting germs of syphilis, the dangers to the innocent and how to avoid these dangers, are themselves saturated with morbid thoughts. Those uninformed persons who at ministerial gatherings refuse to discuss a most vital question to our nation are anti-social beings and a menace to health and morality. It is strange that those who stand outwardly for morality and purity steadily refuse to get at the root of this impurity and disease that is all around them. They stand forth and regret the faded flowers, the rotting fruit as it falls at their feet, and utter sighs and prayers that the youth be delivered from the curse. Yet soil their hands by digging up the roots, they will not.

The first disease that we shall consider in plain terms and with avoidance of all technical theories, is the most contagious—catching—disease known to man. It is also the most destructive to homes, families and the individual. It can KILL, maim, prevent, or rather destroy, the power of reproduction in both man and woman. It can bring a beautiful, imnocent girl, possessing all the attributes for motherhood, to the sad state of sterility—makes it impossible after a few days of nuptial existence for her ever to be anything but an unsexed woman.

These are terrible facts to contemplate, and it is only lately that these real facts have been known concerning the disease GONORRHEA.

To those millions of fathers and young men who have been taught that a “case of gonorthea was nothing worse than a cold in the head’; that it was only an inconvenient incident of “ sowing wild oats,” has come the awful revelation in later life that the disease, once well implanted in their systems, remains there to strike them down at the most momentous periods of their lives. Too long have the doctors given misleading names to afflictions and the causes of death which have kept the public from knowing the real facts.

It is academically said and shouted from the pulpits, that as one sows so shall he reap. This would all be very well to impress upon our youths if it were the whole truth; but it is only partly so. He who “sows his wild oats” does not merely meet the whirlwind; it is a cyclone he meets; one that shatters and ruins his physical body and he only has the weak wreck to offer to a pure girl who herself goes down to physical ruin because these “wild oats” were sown.

Some of these facts are penetrating our young men’s minds.

A short time ago I received an invitation to a young man’s wedding. I knew well his whole life. His education was like most of the American boys; he had been left to pick up important knowledge from the streets and those who walk them. I also knew the girl to be a good girl, sweet, innocent and totally ignorant. It was to be a fashionable wedding; and society in the city where both lived was to attend. The night before the wedding the young man shot himself. He had been “out with the fellows” a week before, celebrating his last days of bachelorhood. He had to consult a doctor. Fortunately for the young girl he found in his consultant a fearless and honest man. This doctor did not tell him that he must postpone the marriage; but that marriage for him at any time would be a crime. The young girl knows now; but it took the self-destruction of a man to instruct her.

Gonorrhea at first appears as a local inflammation in the sexual organs, and is, of course, contracted through illicit intercourse. It is a disease that is practically present in every woman who gives or sells her body; that is active in more than half our young men to-day, and is certain to spread until not one marriage out of fifty is free from the curse and its destructive power. In the men it is generally treated carelessly, in the women often not at all. The local symptoms suppressed, the victim goes on his or her way with the ruinous false impression that the little inflammation is all there is to it. But this is a grave error; insidiously it remains in the system and spreads to various organs in the shape of complications which go under different and misleading names—acute and chronic rheumatism, for example.

These conditions under which gonorrhea coils through man’s tissues do not make it a “ constitutional disease ” like syphilis, which we shall later on consider. That is, it does not modify the tissues and the juices of the body, hence we ~ do not really know whether man or woman can become immune to the disease through repeated inoculation; but all evidence points to the fact that every additional attack in one individual increases the dangers and supplements the prior | attacks.

In this fact lies much of the danger; for a man who consorts with loose women is certain to be inoculated many times, and when he goes to the marriage bed commits the worst kind of crime. He is carrying the disease, ignorantly, of course, direct to a good and pure woman; he is placing his confiding bride on the road to the hospital where she may lie alongside one of the filthy prostitutes who assisted in bringing her there.

The man may have been pure five years before he married, but unless he has understood the facts here placed before you, had the best scientific. treatment, been assured by a _ thorough examination of the fluids which lie back in the glands and membranes deeply situated in front of the bladder, that he is free from infectious germs, he may infect his wife and bring her to asylum or operating table. He may even remain married for several years before these hidden germs become active and find just the right soil in which to propagate—the clean, delicate soil of his wife. ?

Many, oh, so many men, suffer from a chronic gonorrhea which, showing no external signs and being benign as far as pain or discomfort is concerned, believe themselves cured and so marry. Here again, the man throws upon _virgin soil dormant germs of gonorrhea which soon brings the little wife to a bed of misery and disgrace.

The cure of gonorrhea in women is difficult and always uncertain in the class which spread it. The women of this class are naturally careless; and drink, irregular habits and general dissipation prevent any systematized treatment. They are not criminals in the eyes of the law— our health laws are a farce—so cannot be held in hospitals until discharged. They are allowed to come and go at will; there is no law to hold and isolate these disease-breeding people.

But the professional prostitute of experience does try to become safe for the approach of her customers; it is her capital, her professional assets; but these assets are seldom available. It is the clandestine prostitute, the servant girl, the shopgirl whose desire for dress and ornament is greater than her desire for purity, who spread the disease so widely.

What are the complications?

With the exceptions due to the anatomical difference of the external organs between man and woman, the complications of gonorrhea are the same in both sexes. In the man the germs enter the urinary canal at the time of intercourse. Here they will remain for eight or ten days multiplying at a rate scarcely conceivable to man’s power of calculation. ONr pam of these microscopic germs will multiply in ten hours to about three hundred thousand. Now give them two hundred hours at the same rate, and what will the total amount to?