In a full-page article in The Ladies" Home Journal for January, 1909, Helen Keller, the brilliant blind graduate of Radcliffe College, wrote under the heading "I Must Speak":
"The most common cause of blindness is ophthalmia of the new-born. One pupil in every three at the inst.i.tution for the blind in New York City was blinded in infancy by this disease.
"What is the cause of ophthalmia neonatorum? It is a specific germ communicated by the mother to the child at birth. Previous to the child"s birth she has unconsciously received it through infection from her husband. He has contracted the infection in licentious relations before or since marriage. "The cruelest link in the chain of consequences," says Dr. Prince Morrow, "is the mother"s innocent agency.
She is made a pa.s.sive, unconscious medium of instilling into the eyes of her new-born babe a virulent poison which extinguishes its sight."
"It is part of the bitter harvest of the wild oats he has sown."
Miss Keller goes on in her article to tell the women of America that blindness is by no means the most terrible result of this pestilent sin.
INNOCENT WIVES SUFFER.
Dr. Prince A. Morrow, whom Miss Keller quotes, has written a volume on the consequences of these diseases to wives and children. The book is ent.i.tled "Social Diseases and Marriage." On page 132 Dr. Morrow quotes this from Dr. Garrigues:
"I knew a girl in perfect health, of great beauty, of Junoesque proportions, combining muscular strength with regularity of features and graceful movements, possessing a most amiable disposition--in brief a paragon of a wife to make a husband happy. She married a nice young man in a good business. It was a marriage based upon mutual affection and held out every prospect of a long and happy union. A week after her marriage she came to me with an abscess in one of Bartholini"s glands and a profuse discharge. . . . She was under treatment for months. . . . She was seized with violent pain in the lower part of the abdomen and had a temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit and a pulse of 140. . . . The peritonitic infection continued to spread, and laparotomy was performed. Finally she died.
"In many similar cases the patients recovered for the time being, but went on leading a life of invalidism, interrupted by more acute attacks of peritonitis. Some get well after having their ovaries and tubes removed. This, then, is what awaits these poor women--discharges, inflammations, a life full of suffering, capital operations, or death."
A Chicago physician writes to the Chicago Society of Social Hygiene:
"Several years ago there came under my care a case that I can never forget. The patient was a bride twenty-two years old, a beautiful woman of excellent family. She was suffering from a disease contracted from her husband, who had supposed himself cured before the wedding. An operation, which offered the only chance of saving her life, was performed. All went well for a few days. Her husband, who had been constantly with her, was called away on urgent business. The patient suddenly became worse and died before his return."
These two beautiful brides, and countless thousands like them, were killed by a disease of which young men are not afraid, of which they make light in their ignorance. Any physician will attest these statements. Some surgeons attribute three-fourths of the surgical operations on women to this disease; one-fourth is a very conservative reckoning.
THE REMEDY.
Mr. Edward Bok, editor of The Ladies" Home Journal, on the editor"s personal page of that magazine for September, 1908, puts the responsibility for meeting these terrible evils upon parents. He wrote:
"First: We parents must first of all get it into our heads firm and fast to do away with the policy of silence with our children, that has done so much to bring about this condition. Our sons and our daughters must be told what they are, and they must be told lovingly and frankly. But told they must be.
"Second: We fathers of daughters must rid ourselves of the notion that has worked such diabolical havoc of a double moral standard. There can be but one standard: that of moral equality. Instead of being so painfully anxious about the "financial prospects" of a young man who seeks the hand of our daughter in marriage, and making that the first question, it is time that we put health first and money second: that we find out, first of all, if the young man comes to court, as the lawyers say, with clean hands. Let a father ask the young man, as his leading question, whether he is physically clean: insist that he shall go to his family physician, and if he gives him a clean bill of health, then his financial prospects can be gone into. But his physical self first. That much every father would do in the case of a horse or a dog that he bought with a view to mating. Yet he does less for his daughter--his own flesh and blood."
Dr. William Osler, formerly of Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, now of the University of Oxford, in an article describing the diseases which are the greatest scourges of the human race, such as cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, consumption, pneumonia and leprosy, wrote of the group of vice diseases:
"These are in one respect the worst of all we have to mention, for they are the only ones transmitted in full virulence to innocent children to fill their lives with suffering, and which involve equally innocent wives in the misery and shame."
E. A. B.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC AND THE PUBLIC HEALTH.
On Monday, February 8, 1909, The Illinois Vigilance a.s.sociation, an organization having for its object the suppression of traffic in women and girls, held its second annual conference against this evil. The meeting was held in the auditorium of the Young Men"s Christian a.s.sociation, in Chicago.
Dr. Winfield Scott Hall, professor of physiology in Northwestern University Medical School, spoke on the subject that is the t.i.tle of this chapter, and was followed by Judge Julian W. Mack. Their plain, chaste, truthful words gave no offense to the refined ladies and gentlemen, and young ladies and young gentlemen, who composed that large audience of nearly a thousand people. Instead of offense, appreciation and grat.i.tude were in every heart.
The addresses of these two eminent men are here reproduced word for word from the stenographer"s report, not omitting the enlivening interruptions from a woman in the audience, herself a physician and much interested in this reform.
CHAIRMAN BOYNTON: "The White Slave Traffic and the Public Health" is the topic of the address by Dr. Winfield Scott Hall, Professor of Physiology, Northwestern University Medical School:
DR. WINFIELD SCOTT HALL: Ladies and Gentlemen: It might be of interest to note in pa.s.sing that my interest in this matter has been directed particularly along educational lines, to know that since the first of October, 1908, I have addressed young men and boys on this subject to the number of not less than twenty thousand, mostly in the colleges and high schools, setting forth to them in perfectly clear and simple language the proper hygiene and physiology of the s.e.xual system, teaching them the methods of right living.
As to this nefarious traffic that we have just been hearing about, and the relation of that traffic to the public health, I would like in one sentence to sum up a parallel between this white slave trade and the black slave trade that continued from the time of the Colonies to the memory of many of us present. I believe that we have not yet expiated and paid the price of that slave trade and it may be many generations yet before we pay for it. Blood flowing in rivers is a part of that price, from the hearts of the n.o.blest sons of America. This white slave trade must be paid for in blood. Who are the primary victims? In most cases, pure minded girls, ambitious to go out and earn a higher wage and think they can send home wages to father and mother, and they fall into these snares that are set for them.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DENOUNCING THE POLITICIANS WHO PROTECT THE DIVES
The author and his band of n.o.ble workers fighting the evil in the very heart of the vice district]
[Ill.u.s.tration: JAMES BRONSON REYNOLDS
Special investigator for President Roosevelt]
But we must not stop there. These poor girls do not live over at the most ten or fifteen years and a large proportion of them perhaps take their own lives. But if you could see the line of men that I saw the other night pa.s.sing through one of these fifteen-cent lodging houses, lined up as they pa.s.sed through to take their couch for the night, where over two hundred of these men pa.s.sed by, and a large proportion of these men showing ulcers and other superficial stigmata of the venereal diseases! They represent the under world, the under dogs of society, the men who are down and out, who years ago visited the houses of ill-fame and got the disease and are now ekeing out their lives, hoping for the end to come--many of them.
But we can look further for victims. I believe that only a small proportion of the women who are in the houses of ill-fame--only a small proportion--make their way there of their own volition, and that small proportion are of the degenerate cla.s.s who are born with a screw loose somewhere. From their babyhood they who are born with this taint--and we could, perhaps, trace that taint back--but born with that taint, they gradually go into that life--but they make a small proportion. The rest of them are either betrayed into that sort of a life, their lives ruined because they trusted some man, or they are bartered into it through this nefarious white slave traffic.
All lewd women are diseased some of the time and some lewd women are diseased all of the time. Now, whether the lewd woman is of the clandestine type or a professional in the house of ill-fame, it does not matter. Some say the clandestine is the more dangerous. Why? Because no attempt is made to have medical care. . . . That doesn"t get at the real condition at all, and so she retains disease in her body and gives it to every one perhaps who visits her for months to come. When that is in a woman"s system, it is almost impossible to eradicate. It is shocking, but we must know the facts. Statistics show that of the operations on women in the hospitals of New York City year before last for the removal of one or both ovaries, sixty-five per cent of those operations were brought about and necessitated because of gonorrheal infection.
WOMAN IN THE AUDIENCE: And most of them were married women.
DR. HALL: A considerable proportion of them were from the house of ill-fame. No small proportion of them were lawfully wedded, high minded, wives and mothers. Now, it is not customary for a doctor to say to a woman going to the hospital, "Madam, your difficulty is of a venereal origin"--no, he says, "I find an abcess. You must get to the hospital as soon as possible or you probably will lose your life. It is a question of life and death to get to the hospital and have an operation." If the doctor had said to this woman in every case "This is is of gonorrheal origin," you can imagine what the woman would say who knew she had led an innocent, pure life. She would say "Why?"--"You must have got it from some man." "But I never have had any contact with any man but my lawfully wedded husband." "Well, you must have got it from your lawfully wedded husband then."
Our standards are not high enough. Why a lawfully wedded husband should fix it up with his conscience to act so basely towards his wife we have yet to find out. But it is a wrong standard and I am glad to be able to say to the wives and mothers in this audience that almost without exception when I say to young men "Fellows, isn"t it time that we have a single standard of purity for men and women?" they respond the same way you have responded and it is a question of education and we must keep it up.
Fathers and mothers in this audience--and I see there are probably grandfathers and grandmothers--let us see to it that our children are instructed in these matters by telling them the truth in early childhood, and then when they get older--girls fourteen or fifteen years old--let their mothers take them into their confidence and tell them some of these things, tell them the truth and endeavor to protect them against the wiles of tempters out in society.
I hardly need to say anything about syphilis. You know what the leper of the Orient used to be required to do and perhaps to this day--when any one met this leper, you know, he had to stand back and raise a warning hand and say "Unclean, Unclean." But the man who has syphilis, does he have to raise any warning hand? No, he mingles in the best society; he drinks from our drinking gla.s.s and the innocent child perhaps uses the same drinking gla.s.s in the railway train. Fortunately, there is only a short period of time when he can transmit it through the drinking gla.s.s, but during that time there is nothing to restrain him, so far as I know.
When I was a student in the medical school a quarter of a century ago, it was a common thing to pa.s.s over with some jocose remark the disease of gonorrhea. But that isn"t done any more. Why? Because it is now proven to the medical profession that gonorrhea is quite as dangerous as syphilis. But the people in general do not know that. Let us tell the young men, especially, that they cannot afford to run the risk of gonorrhea, because it may not only wreck their own lives but the germs may lurk there and may be transmitted two or three or more years later to some innocent bride.
QUESTION FROM WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: Couldn"t the husbands be examined?
DR. HALL: That is a perfectly fair question. I have a daughter and I want to just say this that no man is ever going to take that daughter from under my roof until I am sure that he has not got tuberculosis, for one thing, and syphilis and gonorrhea for another.
CHAIRMAN BOYNTON: I am sure it is a matter of congratulation that we have physicians in the city of Chicago who can talk as Dr. Hall has talked to us this morning. I am glad the time has come when we can sit as men and women and hear the truth and be unashamed.
I am sure we are all glad to have with us Judge Julian W. Mack of the Circuit Court, who will address us.
JUDGE JULIAN W. MACK: Ladies and Gentlemen: I am on the program for the closing words. I have no particular subject to talk about but it is a great gratification to listen to the words, particularly of Dr. Hall, and to see the response that they receive in a mixed audience such as this. Too long have we buried our heads in the sand; too long have we been silent on these great subjects; too long have we lied to our little ones, and thereby helped to bring about the destruction of so many of them.