The following article appeared as a cover story in Civilization magazine, November 1995 – the year that Civilization won the National Magazine Award. What appears here are only the opening paragraphs.
The Lessons of Syphilis in the Age of AIDS
By Robin Marantz Henig
"The searing droplets of this cruel sickness fall on those who are hot with love and dirtied with lust; it is a punishment for their misdeeds and their shameful desires."
"The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children . . . The poor homosexuals – they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution."
The sentiments of these two pronouncements are startlingly similar, so similar that one might have trouble believing that they were delivered more than 350 years apart – and that they were made about two quite different diseases.
The first statement, which the French poet Jean-Baptiste Lalli made in 1629, refers to syphilis, a disease that has claimed countless lives since it was first recognized by European doctors in the 15th century. The second, made by Patrick Buchanan in a syndicated newspaper column in 1983, refers to the most devastating plague of our time: AIDS.
The similarity in society’s attitudes toward AIDS and syphilis stems from the fact that each is a venereal disease – that is, a disease spread primarily, and most effectively, through sexual activity. Historically, syphilis has been passed along mainly by sex with prostitutes; AIDS – at least in the United States – mostly by gay male sex or illegal drug use. Both illness caused public health officials, struggling to produce eradication strategies, to grapple with what historian Elizabeth Fee of the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health has called "a remarkably similar set of tensions between the moral and biomedical conceptions of disease."
Both syphilis and AIDS prompted public-health campaigns that focused on two different, indeed almost contradictory, approaches. The first tried to discourage sexual activity by emphasizing that the diseases were transmitted sexually. The second downplayed the sexual nature of transmission, emphasizing instead the "innocent victims" whose illnesses made it seem as though everyone were at equal risk.
Pope Leo XII, who represented the first approach, was among the many clerics who considered syphilis a form of righteous justice. In an 1826 proclamation forbidding the use of condoms, he called the disease God’s way to "punish sinners by striking them in the member with which they had sinned." The televangelist Jerry Falwell made a similar pronouncement about AIDS more than 150 years later: The disease, he said, was proof that "a man reaps what he sows. If he sows seed in the field of his lower nature, he will reap from it a harvest of corruption." Such a neat symmetry between sin and retribution provided this vocal segment of society with a convenient way to keep its flock in line.
Indeed, the appeal of using VD as a means of controlling debauchery colored the opinions even of scientists who were working toward its eradication. In 1943, penicillin was shown to be a highly effective cure for syphilis, but many prominent physicians had misgivings about the cure, believing it might encourage extramarital encounters: "Mere treatment of venereal disease is certainly not the answer," wrote Dr. John Stokes, a leading syphilis researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1950. "And were it the answer, and were venereal diseases wiped out, it is now clear that the accomplishment would have heavy costs in the social, moral, and material life of man. A world of accepted, universalized, safeguarded promiscuity is something to look at searchingly before it is accepted."
But while popes, preachers, and physicians were highlighting the sexual nature of venereal diseases, others were trying to camouflage it. The desexualization of VD made it acceptable to discuss the diseases in mixed company, to admit to being infected (as one wag put it, the myth that syphilis could be spread on toilet seats "saved many a marriage"), and to push for disease-control measures and research. This second approach to VD control created two new categories of victims, both of which received far more attention than their numbers warranted. . .