Dr. Mauriac, attending physician to the Hopital du Midi, Paris, and one of the greatest authorities in Europe, says: "If you imagine that the public health is the supreme law, and that it is necessary to employ every means to safeguard it, then strike at the man as well as the woman. . . . Tou exact from these miserable women guarantees for your health, but what guarantees do you give them? None whatever; you infect, and you expect not to be infected; you have therefore caused the system to fail".
At The Hague, in Holland, Dr. Huet, the prefect of police, a surgeon of high standing, says: "The number of 'clandestine' women cannot be estimated and is continually increased. Tou ask me if the laws of regulation work well for morality. I reply, No! Do they work well for suppression of syphilis? I reply, No! Do they really diminish disease? My opinion is, No, no, no!"
Physicians are beginning to deliberate on the expediency of sending in to the health department reports of every case of venereal disease, just as they are now required by law to do in cases of other contagious or infectious diseases ; for gonorrhoea and syphilis are productive of the most deleterious effects, so that medical men believe that it would be far better for the human family if those who go about uncured were wiped out of existence.
If the medical examination of prostitutes did anything to lessen venereal disease and insured a sanitary improvement for the community at large if the experience of other nations had proved it so if it were scientifically reasonable if it shielded the innocent or diminished the amount of prostitution, we should be inclined to favor it; for the abolishment of such dire calamity from the present race and from posterity would in a measure counterbalance the degradation inflicted upon these poor women whom men have set aside for torture, just as the physiologists have set aside a lot of guinea pigs and rabbits and frogs, and other animals for vivisection, with the ultimate public good in view.
In some parts of Europe the women are driven in vans bi weekly to dispensaries, where they pass in review be fire the examiners. Surely neither America nor England can abide to see these unsightly covered wagons, nor tolerate the house-to-house visitation!
"In the year 1869, while studying in Paris, I used often to see passing along the pleasant streets great closed wagons, covered with black. Inquiring of my elegant landlady the explanation of these sombre vehicles, she answered sorrowfully: 'It is the demi monde who go to be examined'. I then learned for the first time that in Paris fallen women have a legal 'permit' to carry on what is a recognized business, but must remain secluded in their houses at certain hours, must avoid certain streets, and must go once a week, under escort of the police, to the dispensary for examination and certificate that they are exempt from contagious disease.
Always after that, those awful wagons seemed to me to form the most heart breaking funeral procession that ever Christian woman watched with aching heart and tear dimmed eyes. If I were asked why there has come about such a revolution in public thought that I have gained the courage to speak of things once unlawful to be told, and you may listen without fear of criticism from any save the base, my answer would be:
"Because lawmakers tried to import the black wagon of Paris to England and America, and Anglo Saxon women rose in rebellion".
To obviate the necessity of appointing public examiners, it has been proposed that the prostitutes might be allowed to choose their own doctors for the examination. In this case then, any one legally authorized to practise medicine could sign the certificate of health, and the outcasts of the profession would soon get all this class of work. Assuredly none of the women would patronize the scientific specialists the only ones whose word is worth having in these cases because their methods are necessarily exact and painstaking, and they would require the patient to remain under observation for many days, even in cases apparently well, before signing any certificate of health.