Sin vs. Science?: Rethinking Venereal Disease in Turn-of-the-Century America

In their analyses of the country’s struggles with sexually transmitted disease, historians of the modern United States often draw a distinction between those who have advocated a “moral” approach to maladies such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and HIV/AIDS, and those who have aimed to combat these conditions along strictly “medical” lines. While capturing a crucial tension in the era’s venereal debates, when viewed from the perspective of Hot Springs—a central Arkansas health resort known throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as the “Mecca of the American Syphilitic”—this “Sin vs. Science” framework appears as something of a false dichotomy. Focusing on the writings of this southern city’s medical professionals, this article examines the rhetorical processes through which a group of local venereal specialists constructed a new narrative of syphilis, one in which religious and scientific discourses surrounding syphilis overlapped and intersected with each other. An amalgamation of medicine and morality, the novel therapeutic imagery crafted by Hot Springs’ resident doctors was part and parcel of the broader venereological community’s professionalization project, as turn-of-the-century venereal specialists throughout the United States saw in their rhetorical efforts a means for achieving legitimacy and respectability vis-a-vis the American medical profession.