Herpes (simplex) is not so easily disposed of. The word "herpes" means a sore made up of clusters of tiny blisters or vesicles. When used alone, the word usually refers to herpes simplex as distinguished from herpes zoster a quite different disease popularly known as "shingles."

Nongonococcal urethritis (NGU) and vulvovaginitis (NGV) are a pair of clinical miscellanies into which some doctors throw genital candidiasis and trichomoniasis as well as a lot of other things. The principal importance of the category apart from the fact that it entails diseases of men (and usually not of women) and of women (and usually not of men) is that these are conditions suspected of being gonorrhea in which no evidence of the gonococcus is found.

Microscopic yeasts called Candida (commonest species Candida albicans, also called Monilia albicans) are part of the normal microbic life in the vagina and are normally harmless, so that merely finding them there in a microscope slide or culture has no special significance.

Here are some of the more important "controversial" diseases: Condyloma acuminatum, or venereal warts, or genital warts, are thought to be ordinary warts that happen to be found on genital surfaces. Warts are benign tumors of the skin. There are different kinds.

Similar reasoning applies to some of the other diseases that have been loosely included in the VD category. This is a wide and miscellaneous collection, hard to characterize as a group in a few words. Some can be transmitted by sexual intercourse but have other ways of getting around as well.

Chancroid, or soft chancre, shows itself as an acute painful destructive ulcer of the genitals followed by buboes or swollen lymph nodes in the inguinal (crotch) area. In LGV there is also a primary sore on the genitals, followed by buboes in the groin; but the initial sore may be small and go unnoticed, especially in women, while the buboes in LGV break down and discharge pus, typically through several openings, and heal forming scar tissue. The LGV infection may spread to neighboring lymph nodes in the abdominal area or in the rectum and lead to painful contracting scars.

Gonorrhea, the most important member of the VD group apart from syphilis, usually starts in a few days — three to five — after contact, typically as a urethritis in men and as vaginitis in women. It begins suddenly, with the urge to urinate frequently in men, with burning pain and with much thick pus in the urine.

Nothing so clearly shows the differences among diseases as such easily distinguishable microbes. Given these differences, fortified with specific antigen antibody reactions, one can go back to clinical differences with confidence. Yet Astruc may just possibly have been right when he suggested that a case of genital ulceration might have been anthrax.

Dr. Bernfeld has a wit appropriate to his mission, which is expressed in four terse case reports. There are cases of false diagnosis, two of gonorrhea and one of syphilis. In one the patient's wife had left him, although she later returned when the facts were established. The fourth case records an explosion between husband and wife over the husband's conclusion that trichomonads found in the wife's vagina implied unfaithfulness. Dr. Bernfeld, as though proving that Brieux's idea of a doctor is still viable, mentions that:

It is time to be more explicit about VD, especially what the different forms look like and how we tell them apart. We all agree in listing two diseases, chancroid and lymphogranuloma venereum (LGV), in addition to syphilis and gonorrhea as "true" venereal diseases, plus another which we are now finding reason to separate from the group, plus a miscellaneous collection of still others on which there is disagreement.