Essays in War-Time: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene by Havelock Ellis

Author:Havelock Ellis [Havelock Ellis]
Language: eng
Format: epub

The final Report of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases has brought to an end an important and laborious investigation at what many may regard as an unfavourable moment. Perhaps, however, the moment is not so unfavourable as it seems. There is no period when venereal diseases flourish so exuberantly as in war time, and we shall have a sad harvest to gather here when the War is over.[1] Moreover, the War is teaching us to face the real facts of life more frankly and more courageously than ever before, and there is no field, scarcely even a battlefield, where a training in frankness and courage is so necessary as in this of Venereal Disease. It is difficult even to say that there is any larger field, for it has been found possible to doubt whether the great War of to-day, when all is summed up, will have produced more death, disease, and misery than is produced in the ordinary course of events, during a single generation, by venereal disease.

There are, as every man and woman ought to know, two main and quite distinct diseases (any other being unimportant) poetically termed "Venereal" because chiefly, though not by any means only, propagated in the intercourse over which the Roman goddess Venus once presided. These two diseases are syphilis and gonorrhoea. Both these diseases are very serious, often terrible, in their effects on the individual attacked, and both liable to be poisonous to the race. There has long been a popular notion that, while syphilis is indeed an awful disease, gonorrhoea may be accepted with a light heart. That, we now know, is a grave mistake. Gonorrhoea may seem trivial at the outset, but its results, especially for a woman and her children (when it allows her to have any), are anything but trivial; while its greater frequency, and the indifference with which it is regarded, still further increase its dangers.

About the serious nature of syphilis there is no doubt. It is a comparatively modern disease, not clearly known in Europe before the discovery of America at the end of the fifteenth century, and by some authorities[2] to-day supposed to have been imported from America. But it soon ravaged the whole of our world, and has continued to do so ever since. During recent years it has perhaps shown a slight tendency to decrease, though nothing to what could be achieved by systematic methods; but its evils are still sufficiently alarming. Exactly how common it is cannot be ascertained with certainty. At least 10 per cent., probably more, of the population in our large cities have been infected by syphilis, some before birth. In 1912 for an average strength of 120,000 men in the English Navy, nearly 300,000 days were lost as a result of venereal disease, while among 100,000 soldiers in the Home Army for the same year, an average of nearly 600 men were constantly sick from the same cause. We may estimate from this small example how vast must be the total loss of working power due to venereal disease.

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