Here in the United States whatever part of the problem is technical ought to be subject to control. Included are better diagnostic methods for gonorrhea, more easily available diagnostic and treatment facilities, and perhaps most important, better VD education of physicians. We no longer have a journal in this country devoted to VD; the goodly output of VD research going on at Atlanta and in a few centers elsewhere (supported largely through the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta) is published for the most part in a British journal or in publications of the WHO. Now that the specialty of dermatology has largely given up VD, as it has done since penicillin made treatment easy (and relatively unprofitable?), VD practice, except for local and federal public health services, has reverted to its ancient status as an outcast.

Public clinics and general hospital outpatient services even in matters more socially acceptable have not altogether outgrown the aroma and chill of the charity ward. Conditions in some of them are still little better than medieval. What has been accomplished in the effort to improve them has been offset, or more than offset, by shortages of medical and paramedical personnel and by accumulating illness especially as the average age of the population increases, and as expanding technology introduces new diseases and aggravates old ones. In hospitals and clinics as well as in private practice, the "interesting" patient, the one who feeds the growing need of medicine as a self styled science (or promises to help out with research grants and potential prizes) is likely to be greeted with more enthusiasm (although not always with better results) than the one with problems banal, disagreeable, and dirty. And of these last, VD is still in the position it has always had, at the bottom. Nevertheless, if you have or think you might have VD, you are still likely to do better in a public clinic than with a private doctor.