Book Description

Excerpt from Journal of Social Hygiene, Vol. 20: January, 1934 In all they found an amount ranging somewhere between two and two and one-half million dollars as the actual sum paid out every year for treatment of the venereal diseases. This expenditure amounted to a yearly cost to each man, woman, and child in St. Louis of from $2.45 to $3.04. The report pictured long lines of ambulatory patients standing before clinic doors, hospital wards filled with sufferers from the late complications of syphilis and gonorrhea, institutions for the blind and semi-sighted peopled in part by those whose vision had been destroyed by the ravages of syphilis. Many inmates in mental institutions were there because of syphilitic infection of the brain and central nervous system. Over 10, 000 private patients in the metropolitan area were continually under treatment by individual physicians for either syphilis or gonorrhea. About half of the many and varied charitable agencies caring for the city's distressed and needy stated that venereal diseases were a complicating factor in the problems they had to meet. One large family case-working agency estimated that 14 percent of the families under their care contained one or more family members with a diagnosed venereal disease, necessitating the expenditure of between$25, 000 and$50, 000 each year from the agency's budget. Enormous as these sums of money are, they do not begin to show what St. Louis should have spent if every infected person were under treatment, for it was found that for every case in the hands of qualified medical practitioners, an unknown number were self-treated, buying worthless nostrums from drug stores, or were in the hands of quacks. Like all other large cities St. Louis has plenty of advertising specialists with their ballyhoo and pink pills. And many other infected persons are ignorant of their infection, or indifferent and not under treatment at all. The findings of this study are recited here, first because the story of St. Louis is the usual story of an American city. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.