B996 <=> B998 [BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 997]

“’And then, among other things I also read assiduously every kind of literature existing here in Europe concerning these diseases, and also most of the books on this question in French and German.

“’This I could easily do because, as you see, I have such a command of French that you can scarcely guess that I am not a real French intellectual; and with the German language also I get along very well, because I lived a fairly long time in Germany and always, in my free time, studied their language and their literature for want of something to do.

“’So, when I became interested in this question, I was able to become fully acquainted with all the knowledge that exists in contemporary civilization on the subject of venereal diseases.

“’In this literature there appeared to be hundreds of theories and hundreds of hypotheses concerning the causes of venereal infection, but I could not discover one convincingly categorical explanation how and why some people are infected with these diseases and others not, and I soon became convinced that I could not clear up this for myself with the knowledge existing on this question at the present time here in Europe.

“’From all this literature – putting aside, of course, and not even mentioning the multitude of those thick “scientific books” here, whose contents immediately show every more or less normal person that they were written by people who were as is said “complete ignoramuses” on these questions, that is to say, not specialists in human diseases at all – I got the general impression that people were infected and fall ill with venereal diseases only owing to their own uncleanliness.

“’When I made this categorical deduction, there was nothing left to me but to concentrate all my attention upon finding out in what my personal cleanliness particularly consisted which had so far protected me against infection.