Venereal Disease. Although gonorrhea, syphilis, and other sexually transmitted diseases existed in colonial America, considerable confusion surrounded the distinctions among them, their causes, and their effects. Sexual activity itself was often blamed for symptoms now recognized as third‐stage syphilis. The Revolutionary Era physician Benjamin
Rush popularized such causal explanations, focusing especially on masturbation. The linking of masturbation and venereal disease continued through the nineteenth century. Medical knowledge about these diseases gradually increased, however. In
A Practical Treatise on Venereal Diseases (1842), the American‐born French researcher Philippe Ricord identified syphilis's three stages and the tertiary stage's devastating effects.
Increasingly, researchers focused on prostitution as a means of transmission. In
History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World (1858), the
New York City physician William W. Sanger estimated that at least 40 percent of the prostitutes he interviewed in New York's Indigent and Convict Hospital in the mid‐1850s had syphilis or gonorrhea. At New York Hospital, the city's preeminent nineteenth‐century medical institution, syphilis and gonorrhea were the most often treated diseases. This connection gave rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a concentrated attack on prostitution, or “the social evil.” The influential
American Medical Association actively supported this campaign. The New York City dermatologist Prince A. Morrow (1846–1914), a prominent figure in the venereal‐disease field in the later part of his life, worked to dispel the silence surrounding these diseases and their spread. Only the elimination of prostitution, not just its regulation, Morrow insisted, would suffice. Because of the reformers' emphasis on sexual self‐control, the U.S. Army during
World War I resisted issuing prophylactics to the troops, a decision that resulted in such rapid spread of venereal disease among U.S. soldiers in France that American military officers at the front were forced to ignore the government's policy.
Despite the public‐education efforts of Morrow and others, venereal disease remained a generally taboo subject until the later 1930s, when the U.S. surgeon general, Thomas Parran, mounted a campaign to increase awareness of how these infections spread and how they could be prevented. The result was a dramatic decrease in venereal disease in the United States, even during
World War II, when the government required that all cases be reported and assigned investigative teams to trace the source. The postwar development of penicillin, tetracycline, and other antibiotics provided powerful new weapons against venereal diseases, although some strains proved resistant. Nevertheless, infection rates began to rise in the 1950s, especially among teenagers and young people, with changing patterns of sexual behavior. The public paid little attention until the early 1980s, however, when the advent of
acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) reinvigorated the campaign to eradicate these ancient scourges, now renamed sexually transmitted diseases.
See also
Disease;
Medicine;
Prostitution and Antiprostitution;
Public Health;
Sexual Morality and Sex Reform.
Bibliography
Alan M. Brandt , No Magic Bullet; A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880, 1985.
Vern L. Bullough
