Venereal Disease: its Prevention, Symptoms and Treatment

Abstract

VENEREAL disease, like all infectious maladies, is to be considered from two aspects, those of prevention and treatment. The importance of the former certainly has full recognition in Dr. Wansey Bayly's book, the preface of which is devoted mainly to a defence of the policy of the Socitety for the Prevention of Venereal Disease. In the first section of the book the author puts forward a scheme whereby he considers that syphilis could be almost entirely eliminated in a generation. Briefly, it consists in compulsory notification to a special Medical Officer of Health, who visits the victim, ascertains from whom the disease was contracted, and traces that individual. Infected persons are given the choice between treatment at a hospital and attendance on a physician of their own selection. Heavy penalties are attached to the doctor who fails to notify, and to the individual who conveys disease to another before being certified free from infection. Such a scheme might, however, defeat its own ends by driving the patient to abstain from treatment altogether or to obtain it secretly and illicitly at the hands of quacks.

Venereal Disease: its Prevention, Symptoms and Treatment.

By Hugh Wansey Bayly. Second edition. Pp. xvii + 176. (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1924.) 7s. 6d. net.