Syphilis Becomes Everyone's Disease: The National Campaign

In 1936 Reinhard's "one-man campaign" against syphilis in Baltimore suddenly became part of a major national effort. Thomas Parran, surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service, now lent the full weight of his energy and authority to a campaign against venereal diseases. A forceful and dynamic man, Parran decided to break through the wall of silence and make the public confront the scope and magnitude of the problem. He thus redefined syphilis as a disease that struck "innocent" victims: the educated, respectable, white population. Although his books, Shadow on the Land and Plain Words about Venereal Disease are best remembered in public health circles, Parran's short popular article, "Why Don't We Stamp Out Syphilis?" published in Survey Graphic and the Reader 's Digest in 1936, reached a much larger popular audience.^[21] In this article, Parran called syphilis "the great American Disease" and declared: "We might virtually stamp out this disease were we not hampered by the widespread belief that nice people don't talk about syphilis, that nice people don't have syphilis, and that nice people shouldn't do anything about those who do have syphilis."^[22] Parran's point was that nice people did have syphilis, and he never tired of pointing out that respectable physicians, innocent children, and heads of industry were among those infected.^[23] If people could only free their minds of "the medieval concept that syphilis is the just reward of sin," he said, they could "deal with it as we would any other highly communicable disease, dangerous to the individual and burdensome to the public at large."^[24]

In order to separate syphilis from its well-worn associations with sin, black immorality, vice, and prostitution, Parran peppered his talks and articles with a series of little anecdotes such as the following: "Remember that a kiss may carry the germ. In an eastern state recently one of our health officers traced 17 cases of syphilis to a party at which kissing games were played."^[25]

Parran declared that half the victims of syphilis were "innocently infected": "Many cases come from such casual contacts as the use of a recently soiled drinking cup, a pipe or cigarette, in receiving services from diseased nursemaids, barber or beauty shop operators, etc., and in giving services such as those of a dentist, doctor, or nurse to a diseased person."^[26] Syphilis was just another contagious disease, although a highly threatening and dangerous one. The point was to find syphilis cases and

to treat them; the state should be obliged to provide treatment, said Parran, and the patient should be obliged to endure it. Syphilis would be the next great plague to go—as soon as the public broke with the old-fashioned and prescientific notion that syphilis was "the wages of sin." From a financial point of view, the state and the individual would profit from early identification and treatment before the disease had a chance to produce "human wrecks, the incompetents, the criminals."

In Baltimore, Huntington Williams, the young commissioner of health, took up the campaign as articulated by Parran. He termed syphilis "the greatest unmet problem of public health" but declared that "medical science has all the weapons it needs to defeat this tiny but ferocious enemy, once the defenses thrown up by society itself are beaten down."^[27]

Beginning in 1936 the new syphilis campaign began to have an impact on the local press. The Baltimore Health News , a popular health magazine published by the city, began the process with two issues devoted to syphilis. The American Public Health Association broadcast a radio message on syphilis from its annual meeting in New Orleans; the Baltimore health department reprinted Parran's Reader 's Digest article and showed a "talking-slide film" entitled "For All Our Sakes" to large and apparently enthusiastic audiences; the local press and radio stations picked up the campaign.^[28]

But while the city health department was consolidating the new biomedical approach to syphilis, it was suddenly challenged with a new moral crusade against vice and prostitution—led by none other than the redoubtable J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.