Syphilis and professionalization of twentieth-century psychiatry

“Syphilis offered psychiatrists and social workers a tantalizing but perfectly legitimate entrée into the domestic realm, and, as such, underwrote their conviction that in the future science would exempt no human activity, however intimate, from expert scrutiny. . . . But syphilology had helped make it possible for psychiatrists to conceptualize sex as a discrete, nonpsychological issue, and to imagine that in implementing a policelike investigatory strategy they were acting in the name of science, not morality. Syphilology brought psychiatry into medicine by means of the disease paradigm to which it conformed. Just as important, however, it gave psychiatrists license to bring sex into psychiatry” (Lunbeck, 52, 53-54).