From J. McNEALE DONNELLY, Esq., M.D., Officiating Deputy Surgeon-General, Her Majesty's Forces, British
Burma Division, to the Inspector-General of Jails, with Civil Medical Administration, British Bur-
ma,—No. 120, dated the 16th February 1885.
Rangoon
Moulmein,
Thayetmyo
Bassein.
Toungoo.
Akyab.
I HAVE the honour to acknowledge your letter,
No. 106-18, dated the 11th February 1885, with its
accompanying documents as noted in the margin.
I have perused with much interest these reports on the working of the lock-
hospital system of Rangoon, Thayetmyo, and Toungoo during the year 1884.
But I do not know that I can make upon them any observations that would im-
prove their value, or offer a probable solution of the difficult problem of how best
to suppress the clandestine prostitution with which they all deal.
The history of these institutions for the year in question is but a record of
my own experiences while connected with similar establishments elsewhere. The
statistics, however valuable when simply comparing the events of one year with
another, are too limited to be of any use in drawing conclusions, not largely
made up of conjecture, to guide us towards the one great object underlying the
maintenance of lock-hospitals in every country, namely, the eradication of syphilis
from the long list of maladies which have ever afflicted the human race, and
many of which are not much less terrible than it, though we look upon them with
equanimity as inevitable or as incurable.
The number of soldiers for whose benefit these hospitals were primarily es-
tablished amounted to a total of 4,147 men, and of these there were attacked with
some form or other of venereal affection 317 individuals, or one in every 13 ; of
these 4,147 soldiers, 1,628 were Europeans and 2,519 Natives, But while one in
every 5 . 13 Europeans suffered, only one in every 114 Natives was affected. Here
again we possess no means of coming to a satisfactory conclusion as to the cause
of this difference, though I think we will not err much in regarding superior
morality on the part of the latter as playing but a very small part in it.
The question now suggests itself whether a similar or a greater number of the
soldiers of the force would have been the subject of these disorders had no lock-
hospitals existed. The reports on these institutions do not give a satisfactory
answer, for they all show that the present agency is unequal to the suppression
of clandestine prostitution, while those entitled to follow their avocation in the
eyes of all men are rarely the source whence the soldier derives his malady. It
is not a pleasant reflection that between the lines of these reports a distrust of
the advantages and a dissatisfaction with the machinery of the Contagious
Diseases Act on the part of their authors can be clearly read. But, from the
beginning of civilization, prostitution has engaged the attention of Governments
and been abandoned to itself only when all efforts to control it were found use-
less ; for a great physiological fact has generally been either unknown to or ignor-
ed by those who have made laws to eradicate or regulate it, and this is that the
evil which flows from irregular intercourse of the sexes is an uncontrollable factor
in the evolution of race, compelling men not to be merely chaste from the
moralist's point of view, but to take upon them the burden of a family. The
strongest of all instincts leads them to this ordinarily, but a knowledge of the
painful results of evading the burden has always been a powerful incentive to the
enterprise, and it will remain so no matter what efforts Governments make to
step in between nature and the methods she adopts for the propagation and ad-
vancement of species.
Looking at the matter from a benevolent point of view, it is satisfactory to
know that of the 317 instances of venereal affections, 132 were purely local, neither
affecting the individual permanently nor his progeny at all, but only by their pain-
ful inconvenience impressing upon him the benefits of personal chastity. Of the
remaining 185, it is in accordance with experience to assume that not more than
one-fourth, or say 50, will result in any remote consequences.