Contagious diseases : and the insufficiency of the measures adopted for their prevention.

Date:
[1874]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Contagious diseases : and the insufficiency of the measures adopted for their prevention. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    their sin is ; and hence men are often found to speak of giving infection with a levity which it is awful to hear. But should the measures we have proposed be caiTied into effect, and prosecutions be reported from time to time in the public papers which are read by all classes, people's eyes would be opened. Young men, being aware that their acquaintances know what is going on in the world, will be anxious to avoid even the suspicion of such a degree of tur- pitude ; and, with the general improvement of morals which must follow, there will be a corresponding diminution of contagion. APPENDIX A. The colony alluded to is Hong-Kong. This colony has not confined its legislation to indirect enactments. On the 23rd May, 1867, it passed an ordinance (No. 10 of that year), which decreed that, if any man be proved to have infected with a contagious disease the inmate of a brothel, he shall be liable to a fine or imprisonment. We wish we could add that such an attempt at legislation had been a successful one. But from all the information we have been able to collect from residents in the colony, we believe that it has hitherto been a dead letter. The fact is discouraging ; for if so salutary a law cannot be carried out in a small island, having a male population for the most part inured to military discipline and a female population hardly raised above domestic slavery, there is little hope of its being carried out in a country like England, where the population is so large, and there is so little control over individual actions. Nevertheless, this colony deserves the best thanks of mankind for a most important step made in social science. They have done what no legislature of the Old World seems to have thought of. They have put the two sexe3 on an equal footing, in theory at least; and made pro- vision for punishing the offender, as well as the comparatively helpless sufferer.