The Manawatu Herald. Tuesday, March 14, 1916. SOCIAL DISEASES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1522, 14 March 1916, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. Tuesday, March 14, 1916. SOCIAL DISEASES.

Saturday’s Wellington Post contained an interesting interview with a leading Wellington medical man concerning social diseases, the spread of which is causing grave concern not only in this country but in England where the report of a commission on the subject reveals the most serious conditions. Some time since our Palmerston morning contemporary directed attention to this evil in a very courageous manner and we are pleased to know that it has been the means of directing attention to the subject in the proper quarter. In the interview above mentioned the man of medical science says: “We have to face things as they are, and men as they are ; not as we would have them to be ; not as so many of them would, I am sure, like themselves, to be able to resist temptation, regarding their bodies as temples lor the habitation of those highest and noblest instincts which distinguish the man from the animal. I am stire that fear of the consequences is a powerful deterent when the man, the young man, is brought face to face with the consequences. No one can do that better than the medical man speaking as a man to men straight-out and in plain unvarnished English. I feel that much harm has been done by unqualified .‘specialists’ in social purity. Things are often put into the minds of boys and young men that were never there before, and incalculable mischief has resulted. That is what I mean by education — education by men qualified to teach the things that every young man ought to know, not only for his own sake, but for the sake of those who come after him and future generations. A great opportunity is afforded to get in some good work—-I don’t view that it is not already being done — in the territorial and in the expeditionary camps. Here young men (for all must go through at least the military training) could be addressed by medical men, speaking out-right, direct and with force to their hearers, illustrating their lectures with kinematograph films and lantern slides. They would have prepared young men for what they have already and will have to face in Egypt, going there into a veritable sink of iniquity, a place where morals as jye know them do not exist, and where the danger to health cannot be over-estimated. Hard indeed must it be for the strongest minded of them to resist temptation. But I don’t like talking about our boys at Trentham. X don’t for one moment imagine that they are any more prone to vice than men under military training. Possibly not so much. Next to educating the men, particularly the young men, here is scope for a great deal of useful preventive work to be done for them by those in authority. Bet me suggest one: There should undoubtedly be a restriction of the facilities and inducements offered to young men to drink to excess. These are unquestionably making Indirectly for the spread ot contagious diseases. You know what a young fellow is like when fie has a iktle liquor. aboard. He feels

‘gay' and in order to complete his night out he pursues the course so described in the seventh chapter ot Proverbs. Young men who are half intoxicated have no discernment as they would have if sober, and have but a single purpose in view. The means of their undoing are to hand. Too late they realise with the women ready to pounce upon them, as the sage has put it: ‘Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.’ Well, ought we to contribute to this kind of thing by allowing facilities for young fellows to make a regular night of it, their moral tone lowered and their ability to resist immorality weakened by drinking. I’m not confining my remarks to the soldiers. Don’t think that ; but if the ease with which drink can be obtained leads to this kind of thing and the spread of these contagious diseases, then surely we ought to do what we can in the way ot preventive measures to at least check it. I know that from my own early student days to now, young men have said to me, “Well, doctor, it would not have happened, but I was full at the time, and—well, you understand.’ In other words, had they been sober they would not have gone crooked. Alas ! This terrible disease of syphillis does not begin and end in the one individual. Besides, it is destructive of the mental faculties as well as of the physical. Innumerable cases are in mental hospitals as the result of syphillis. Gonnorhea is, too, a most frightful cause of sterility in women. These fearful scourges ot contagious diseases cannot be dealt with in so delicate and discreet a manner as to take the sting out of them. Here they are —a horrible menace, syphillis is transmissable to the pure and innocent. It must be tackled in a thorough going fashion. It’s no use blinking the facts. They are all too patent. The press can do a very great deal in conducting a campaign against the spread of contagious diseases in our midst and demanding that the problem shall be taken in hand without delay.”