Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II

3. “Reservoirs of Infection”: Science, Medicine, and Contagious Bodies

“Reservoirs of Infection” Science, Medicine, and Contagious Bodies The wartime definition of contagious bodies was a product of discourses of medicine and science, including the social sciences. These discourses include not only those circulating during the 1940s but also those of the preceding decades. Ideologies, theories, stereotypes, attitudes , and perceptions of gender, class, ethnicity, and race that surfaced and resurfaced during the war years both reflected and reinforced preexisting assumptions regarding particular bodies as always prone to deviance and disease. Because the disease in question was venereal, the bodies in question were constituted as dangerous, both morally and medically. During World War II a belief that some bodies (female and nonwhite) were dangerous shaped government policies and social attitudes . Sexually transmitted diseases have a long and complicated history.1 Controversies over venereal diseases and their interpretations converge at an intersection of political, philosophical, medical, moral, racial, class, and gender dialogues. Thus discourses of venereal disease have often exceeded the boundaries of science and medicine. During the Second World War, syphilis and gonorrhea represented not only communicable diseases but also signs of danger and disorder in the social body, particularly in its female aspect. Complex sociocultural meanings surrounded, and continue to surround, concepts and categories such as disease, sin, deviance, race, women, and prostitutes, to name a few. In the early twentieth century, when the physician and experimental scientist Paul Erhlich discovered an arsenic-based treatment for syphilis, he referred to it as a “magic bullet.” The new drug, Salvarsan, seemed to offer hope that another serious communicable disease could be controlled , perhaps even cured. But in spite of this scientific breakthrough, venereal diseases remained in the realm of the unspeakable, emerging 3 61 only occasionally to be considered as medical rather than moral problems . When Thomas Parran, MD, was appointed surgeon general of the USPHS in 1936, his priorities included lifting the silence and removing the moral stigma around venereal diseases. Nonetheless, a connection persisted between venereal disease and sin. In 1940, for example, when Paul De Kruif discussed Erhlich’s discovery, he still referred to the arsenical treatment as “a deliverer from the scourge of that pale corkscrew microbe whose attack is the reward of sin, whose bite is the cause of syphilis, the ill of the loathsome name.”2 And while Parran spoke of treating venereal diseases just like any other communicable diseases, he too could not completely escape from the influences of his time, including the belief that race affected the etiology of disease. For example, the surgeon general wrote that “it is not his [the black man’s] fault that the disease is biologically different in him than in the white, that his blood vessels are particularly susceptible so that late syphilis brings with it crippling circulatory diseases, cuts his working usefulness in half, and makes him an unemployable burden upon the community in the last years of his shortened life. It is through no fault of hers that the colored woman remains infectious two and one half times as long as the white woman.”3 Wittingly or unwittingly, such statements contributed to a belief that venereally diseased African Americans not only were biologically different from white people but also posed unique dangers to the larger society. Women, both black and white, and black men became the primary signifiers of venereal disease, allowing a perception of white men, especially servicemen, as innocent victims of these diseases and by extension the most moral members of society. Such discourses, which marked particular bodies and left others unmarked, continued, over time, to confound wartime attempts to deal with sexually transmitted diseases in a medical framework. Historian John Duffy notes that while “existing medical knowledge defined the limits of health activity . . . that alone did not determine what would happen.”4 Nonmedical factors such as politics, economics, religion, and issues of class, race, ethnicity, and gender all influenced perceptions of and policies regarding venereal disease and its prevention and control during World War II. The competing discourses that circulate around the topic of venereal diseases illuminate the clash between medical and moral perceptions of sexually transmitted diseases. Alan M. Brandt, in his work on the social history of venereal disease in the United States, considers “venereal disease in its social constructions.” He analyzes the ways in which three 62 | “Reservoirs of Infection” factors, “sex, disease, and medicine,” both “engage social fears” and...