Twenty years later the French playwright Eugene Brieux tried the theme of syphilis again, but in a very different way. Shaw, who introduced Brieux to the English speaking world and wrote a preface to the translation of the play, Les Avaries (Damaged Goods), says:

“After the death of Ibsen, Brieux confronted Europe as the most important dramatist west of Russia. In that kind of comedy which is so true to life that we have to call it tragi comedy, and which is not only an entertainment but a history and a criticism of contemporary morals, he is incomparably the greatest writer France has produced since Moliere.”

Damaged Goods was written just a few years before three key discoveries opened up new means toward control of syphilis. It was first performed in Paris in 1901, but was immediately censored and moved to Liege and Brussels, where it was shown on successive days in 1902. The censorship having been lifted, the play came back to Paris on February 22, 1905. Later in that same year came the announcement of the discovery of Treponema pallidum by Schaudinn and Hoffmann. The following year Wassennann and his helpers described the blood test still known by his name; and in 1910 Ehrlich reported the first real cure, popularly called "salvarsan" or by the number of the trial chemical, "606." But even though, like his countryman Buret, Brieux would seem to have been a little premature, the fact is that he had the information he needed. Four prominent French syphilologists were godfathers to the play. The French version is dedicated to Professor Alfred Fournier, after whom an institute in Paris devoted to the study of syphilis has been named. The key paragraph of the dedication, which is omitted in the English translation, says something like this:

“I think, with you, that syphilis will become much less serious when we are able to speak openly of it without shame or fear of punishment; and when those affected by it, aware of the suffering they may cause in others, will better appreciate their duty to those others as well as to themselves.”

The English version, translated by John Pollock, was first issued in 1907. In his preface Shaw attacks the censorship in England, but gives no facts or dates. One is left with the vague impression that all the Brieux plays were censored there and that none had been staged at least up to 1909, the date of the preface in my edition. News of the great discoveries in syphilis of 1905 and 1906 had evidently not yet reached Shaw, although he speaks of Neisser's discovery of the gonococcus in 1897.