epidemics, pursue their work of destruction quietly, slowly undermining,
in their long-drawn course, the very foundations of human life.
Tuberculosis, or consumption, now the best known of the three, may
perhaps be called the first of these great plagues, not because it is
the oldest or the most wide-spread necessarily, but because it has been
the longest known and most widely understood by the world at large.
Cancer, still of unknown cause, is the second great modern plague. The
third great plague is syphilis, a disease which, in these times of
public enlightenment, is still shrouded in obscurity, entrenched behind
a barrier of silence, and armed, by our own ignorance and false shame,
with a thousand times its actual power to destroy. Against all of these
three great plagues medicine has pitted the choicest personalities, the
highest attainments, and the uttermost resources of human knowledge.
Against all of them it has made headway. It is one of the ironies, the
paradoxes, of fate that the disease against which the most tremendous
advances have been made, the most brilliant victories won, is the third
great plague, syphilis--the disease that still destroys us through our
ignorance or our refusal to know the truth.

We have crippled the power of tuberculosis through
knowledge,--wide-spread, universal knowledge,--rather than through any
miraculous discoveries other than that of the cause and the possibility
of cure. We shall in time obliterate cancer by the same means. Make a
disease a household word, and its power is gone. We are still far from
that day with syphilis. The third great plague is just dawning upon
us--a disease which in four centuries has already cost a whole inferno
of human misery and a heaven of human happiness. When we awake, we shall
in our turn destroy the destroyer--and the more swiftly because of the
power now in the hands of medicine to blot out the disease. To the day
of that awakening books like this are dedicated. The facts here