Ladies & Syphilis

With large ads in 14 newspapers the Ladies' Home Journal last week called attention to an article on syphilis in its August issue entitled "We Can End This Sorrow" by Paul de Kruif & Dr. Thomas Parran Jr., Surgeon General of the U. S. Public Health Service. It was Dr. Parran who made the U. S. press syphilis-conscious, brought the subject into open discussion this year in newspapers, magazines and books (TIME, April 6 et seq.). The Journal in its ads harked proudly back to pre-Parran days:

"Thirty-two years ago the Ladies' Home Journal began the first crusade against venereal disease ever to appear in a magazine of general circulation. In a few short months it brought more than 75,000 cancellations of subscriptions. Yet Edward Bok, editor of the Journal, persisted in the face of threats of physical violence, business ruin, social ostracism."

Opening gun of the late Mr. Bok's campaign was fired in March 1906, in an editorial headed "Frankness With Children." Said he: "The tenderest parent sometimes grows tired of the eager eyes and hungry brain of his child. The poor little traveler is bewildered by the strange world in which he suddenly finds himself. . . . For absolute filth, go and listen to the talks of the boys and girls during recess in our schools. Some of these little ones belong to refined Christian families. Their parents would shrink in horror at the thought of unveiling the sacred mysteries of sex and birth to their innocent minds."

The dynamite in that famous editorial was the little word, "sex." Two months later Mr. Bok soothed his sensitive readers with: "The forbidden word in this magazine will remain forbidden until conditions of absolute necessity force it to become otherwise." Mr. Bok permitted sex to rear its ugly head again in January 1909 when he published a full-page article by blind Helen Keller giving medical statistics of the results of syphilis and gonorrhea, but not mentioning either disease by name.

In his autobiography Mr. Bok told what happened next:

"Letters from men now began to pour in by the hundreds. With an oath on nearly every line, they told him [Bok] that their wives, daughters, sisters, or mothers had demanded to know this cause, and that they had to tell them. Bok answered these heated men and told them that was exactly why the Journal had published the editorial [article], and that in the next issue there would be another for those women who might have missed his first." Then Mr. Bok dropped the whole subject, but kept on crusading against the public drinking cup and the common towel.

The present editors of the Ladies' Home Journal, Bruce & Beatrice Gould (man & wife), were unable to find any quotes from the Bok editorials to run with the de Kruif-Parran article to prove that Bok said it first many years ago.' But it can fairly be said that Editor Bok pitched the first ball, even though it was a roundhouse curve.

The de Kruif-Parran article is a statement of the known facts about syphilis and its treatment, written in Mr. de Kruif's breathless style. Example: "And what is more dastardly than the way this microbe gangster then sneaks back out of his hiding? So that a husband, having long ago forgotten a past indiscretion, may then infect his wife. So that a mother, unaware that death has ever lurked within her, may pass it to the babe growing in her womb." Constructively, the Ladies' Home Journal backed up the article by editorially endorsing a Wassermann test for every pregnant woman and as a routine premarital requirement.

An effective stroke of editing was the publication in the same issue of the Journal of a short story by Nancy Hale, "The Blue-Muslin Sepulchre," which originally appeared in Scribner's. This story, a telling blow of fiction in Dr. Parran's war, describes the tragedy of a respectable family of two frail daughters and their mother who are kept in ignorance by the family doctor of the father's syphilis.

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