Changing Attitudes Toward Venereal Disease

Abstract

HE LAST three or four decades have witnessed a striking change of attitudes toward venereal diseases. In the prewar period, if anyone had openly discussed venereal diseases, he would have been ostracized from respectable society. Today, venereal are openly discussed in newspapers, journals, and within various organizations. This paper will analyze and interpret some of these changing attitudes. A study of the literature reveals a slow cumulation of changes up to the War, a relatively great change at time, a slowing down but continuing cumulation after the War, and on the foundation of these accumulated changes, an apparently great modification of public attitudes in the 1930 decade. This is shown more specifically by the number of articles on venereal indexed in the Reader's Guide and the International Index between i905 and October 1939. The average annual number of articles in the period i905-i6 was 6; 1917-19, 39; 1920-29, i6; 1930-35, 34; and then the spectacular increase from 1936 to October 1939 of 86. This same general pattern is revealed by the average annual news items on veneral listed in the New York Times Index: prior to I9i8, no items; i918-19, 3; I920-29, I; 1930-35, 2; 1936 to October 1939, 57.1 This suggests a rather natural division of these changing attitudes into Prewar, War, Postwar, and the I930 Decade. The Prewar Period. The general tendency in the prewar period was to place a moral stigma upon anything connected with venereal diseases. Popular prejudices included the views a venereal disease was an automatic index of sin which merited divine punishment, infected persons made up an obnoxious, immoral class, and any discussion of venereal disease almost put one in the class with those who actually were infected. Collective attitudes were reflected in words and phrases like such patients, diseases of vice, diseases of prostitutes, that kind of work, and the fact no reputable physician would allow his name to be associated with the treatment of infected persons.2 However, even in this early period, there was some modification of attitudes toward venereal diseases. The discovery of the organism of