“Materialised images” of syphilis in the 1st half of the 20th century at Rostock

Abstract

Syphilis is defined as a sexually transmitted disease caused by the organism spirochete pallidum. It has concerned medicine since its appearance in Europe at the end of the 15th century. In the 19th and 20th centuries in particular, newly established clinics for dermatology and syphilis began to produce teaching material describing syphilis. With the development of antibiotics at the beginning of the 2nd half of the 20th century, syphilis became sufficiently treatable. Its importance changed and we lost the memory of the great impact syphilis had on medicine and society. So what was syphilis like before? I think the answer lies in the historical collections. Writing history from the perspective of medical objects requires a field of research called “material history of medicine.”I will introduce it and my method of “object information analysis.”Then I will go through the Dermatological Collection Rostock with a focus on objects (“plates”and “moulages”) depicting syphilis (“materialised images”). They were made in the first half of the 20th century. Although the collection was severely decimated during the Second World War, a “post-war syphilis teaching collection”survived. This gives us a vivid picture of syphilis at a time when the discourse of visualisation was perhaps most influential among scholars such as those in Rostock.