156 7) to Monlau and Hauser‘s evaluations of Spanish society, degeneration was inextricably interwoven with the themes of sexual transgression and venereal disease. Dire warnings about the prospects of survival of the family line, on the one hand, and the future of society and the species, on the other, were the result of the medicalization of sexuality that followed the Enlightenment that Foucault refers to as, ―the new technologies of sex‖ (Foucault, Sexuality, 117-9). He comments that,
the analysis of heredity was placing sex (sexual relations, venereal diseases, matrimonial alliances, perversions) in a position of ―biological responsibility‖ with regard to the species: not only could sex be affected by its own diseases, it could also, if it was not controlled, transmit diseases or create others that would afflict future generations. (Foucault, Sexuality 118)
From the 1880s onwards, syphilis and its hereditary consequences became a national health problem in many countries where the discoveries of venereologists like Alfred Fourier 258 unleashed a wave of syphilophobia and panic because of fears of degeneration of the race and national depopulation (Viñeta-Bellasierra 39). Fourier, himself, saw syphilis and alcoholism as the two great social scourges of his time, with their dangers for the individual, for future generations and for society as a whole (Fernández, Mujer 93). Society, with the middle-class family at its heart, saw itself threatened, ―para la moral burguesa, en que la familia y el mundo doméstico ocupaban un lugar fundamental, las enfermedades venéreas se convertían en un ataque a la institución‖ (Castejón, médicos 79). The Other, those who survived by Alfred-Jean Fourier (1832-1914): disciple of the great venereologist Ricord and foremost syphilologist in France in the last 30 years of the nineteenth century. He established that syphilis is the cause of spinal locomotor ataxia (tabes dorsalis) and of general paralysis of the insane (G.P.I.) (Waugh 232-4). 258