"Knowing what excellent results can be obtained without using drugs which impair the health and sometimes blind or even kill the patient, I never now advise their use.

   "That many in the profession are dissatisfied with the present drug treatment of syphilis is proved by the fact that less toxic drugs are, from time to time, recommended in medical journals as a cure for the disease.

   "Needless to say, such an unreliable test as the Wassermann plays no part in the guidance of my treatment. Marshall and French, in their book, Syphilis and Venereal Diseases, utter a warning against the dangerous tendency at the present day to exalt the value of laboratory diagnosis and neglect that of clinical experience. M'Donagh of the London Lock Hospital has also shown the fallacy of relying upon the test, which is not a specific one. A positive Wassermann denotes an acid condition of the blood, a state which is common to numbers of diseases other than syphilis.

   "Present-day treatment and laboratory diagnosis makes for damnable pessimism and degenerative disease of the nervous system. Again, a syphilitic suspect is kept under surveillance so long and tested so often that only the very strong-minded or callous can hope to avoid the depression of syphilophobia and its more or less acid condition of the blood, which so often spells a positive Wassermann.

   "Those who talk learnedly of the incurability of syphilis without drugs base their opinions on what frequently happens in the case of patients feeding in the conventional manner, which, as I have already shown, makes for disease instead of health." — Major Reginal F. E. Austin, R.A.M.C. (Retired), M.R.C.S., Eng., L.R.C.P., Lond.