It will, perhaps, be remarked that these testimonies of medical men who, by their generally high position, or their lengthened experience, or their special experience, are so well qualified to judge, are selected testimonies; and against them will be set the testimonies of Sir James Paget, Sir W. Jenner, and Mr. Prescott Hewett, who regard the evil as a very grave one. To gather accurately the consensus of medical opinion would be impracticable without polling the whole body of physicians and surgeons; but we have a means of judging which view most truly meets with "the emphatic concurrence of numerous practitioners:" that, namely, of taking a local group of medical men. Out of fifty-eight physicians and surgeons residing in Nottingham and its suburbs, fifty-four have put their signatures to a public statement that syphilis is "very much diminished in frequency, and so much milder in form that we can scarcely recognize it as the disease described by our forefathers." And among these are the medical men occupying nearly all the official medical positions in the town—Senior Physician to the General Hospital, Honorary Surgeon ditto, Surgeons to the Jail, to the General Dispensary, to the Free Hospital, to the Union Hospital, to the Lock Hospital (four in number), Medical Officers to the Board of Health, to the Union, to the County Asylum, etc., etc. Even while I write there comes to me kindred evidence in the shape of a letter published in the British Medical Journal for July 20, 1872, by Dr. Carter, Honorary Physician to the Liverpool Southern Hospital, who states that, after several debates at the Liverpool Medical Institution, "a form of petition strongly condemnatory of the Acts was written out by myself, and .... in a few days one hundred and eight signatures" (of medical men) "were obtained." Meanwhile, he adds, "earnest efforts were being made by a number of gentlemen to procure medical signatures to the petition in favor of the Acts known as the 'London Memorial'—efforts which resulted in twenty-nine signatures only."
Yet notwithstanding this testimony great in quantity, and much of it of the highest quality, it has been possible so to present the evidence as to produce in the public mind, and in the Legislature, the impression that peremptory measures for dealing with a spreading pest are indispensable. As lately writes a Member of Parliament:
- ↑ "A Treatise on Syphilis," by Dr. E. Lancereaux, vol ii., p. 120. This testimony I quote from the work itself, and have similarly taken from the original sources the statements of Skey, Simon, Wyatt, Acton, and the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review. The rest, with various others, will be found in the pamphlet of Dr. C. B. Taylor on "The Contagious Diseases Acts."
