THE VENEREAL PERIL.

The papers and discussions of the symposium on venereal disease and on the duty of the medical profession to womankind, given at Boston last June and published in this and previous issues of The Journal,¹ deal with a subject that is seldom thus publicly discussed, but which is none the less one on which the enlightened opinion of the medical profession should be in evidence. In the ever-needed reforms here indicated the medical profession must necessarily be the leading factor. That large portion of mankind which is not influenced by purely moral considerations or that needs an unmoral stimulus to self-control, can be reached to a large extent by medical instruction, and the latter certainly will be a valuable adjunct to the higher arguments with the weak and the weaker wilful transgressors.

The spread of venereal diseases is largely through ignorance, and there is doubt whether physicians have done all