Syphilis

“When patients turned to private practitioners they often found themselves being treated by doctors inadequately trained to diagnose and treat venereal diseases effectively. Most physicians did not consider the sexually transmitted diseases to be a particularly interesting or status-oriented clinical specialty. According to some public health officials, syphilis was treated like the ‘illegitimate child’ of medicine, tossed between dermatology and urology depending upon the manifest symptoms. Syphilis and gonorrhea were given minimal time in the average medical school curriculum” (Brandt, 132). . . . Physicians and public health officials in the 1930s went on the attack against the moralistic precepts of social hygiene, an attach that Thomas Parran was to lead. Doctors urged that the time had come to reject euphemism, reduce moralism, and address the venereal problem on the level of science and medicine” (136).