1937

Surgeon General Thomas Parran publishes Shadow on the Land that detailed his campaign against syphilis. In May, 1938, Congress passed the National Venereal Disease Control Act, the crowning achievement of Parran’s campaign against VD (Brandt, 142-147). The Act marked, along with other New Deal welfare legislation, “a shift in notions of federal responsibility for ameliorating social problems.” The Act provided federal grants to state boards of health to develop antivenereal measures (144).