The drama and serious literature of more recent times have only occasionally made use of VD as a significant part of their theme. An unmentioned gonorrhea is an important detail of the play by Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). The male lead had infected his first sweetheart, the ingenue; and, their love having been thwarted by her politician father, the lead has become a gigolo. The ingenue has been operated on; and she says the doctor's "knife had cut the youth out of my body, made me an old, childless woman." More recently a play on Broadway, Philosophy in the Boudoir, adapted from the work of the Marquis de Sade, was described by Clive Barnes in a review in the New York Times in part as follows:

“The story is nothing but the education by a group of libertines of a young but not too innocent girl into the ways and, more especially, the byways of sex and sexuality. The high point arrives when the mother of the seduced innocent comes to claim her daughter and is raped by a man with syphilis and then later mutilated.”

In refreshing contrast to this horror is the chapter that deals with VD and its treatment in the U.S. Army in World War II, in The Gallery by John Home Burns (1947). To me this is a remarkable document in the literature of syphilis in its own right, and the more valuable for expressing with eloquent artistry the rarely heard viewpoint of the patient. Bums wrote only one other book (A Cry of Children) before he died prematurely. The thirty odd pages of his chapter in The Gallery ("Eighth Portrait: Queen Penicillin") are recommended reading.

It is good to have a sensitive writer's insight into the experience of being infected with syphilis by a loved one, and how it felt to have it treated as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army in Naples in 1944. We can learn something vicariously here about the depths of human misery, much as we can learn the same sort of lesson from Beethoven's last quartets. There is no bravado, no smirking. There is an evocation of love tragically wounded, yet without hate, even without bitterness; and even the callousness of orderlies and the casual detachment and occasional cruelty of doctors are painted with deft, sure strokes. Penicillin was new then. The first definitive papers on its use in syphilis appeared in that same year, 1944, although it had been under study in the Army for some two years previously. Its value at the time was still not fully established. Nevertheless the treatment was effective, and it was administered efficiently, although more than a little punishment was mixed in with it. The tone of the treatment center is suggested by this exchange with the admitting medical officer:

"So you got burned?" the major said. "And you'll be losing those three stripes too."
"Yessir."
"I don't say: Welcome to our hospital. You're not going to have a good time here. Our whole setup is guaranteed to make you hate everything about us. We don't want men coming back here, do you see? There's no excuse for getting YD. No excuse whatever. We give you treatment here, but we do it in such a way that you won't care to come back as a repeater. ..."

The artist's eyes, showing us familiar things in a quite new way, as Cezanne did, struck my own special experience with “desks where microscopes stood in their metal frames like scrub women resting on their brooms.”

Let me leave the story, hoping you will read it all yourself, with these words of the chaplain's, who is afraid to shake hands because "Cod has made certain diseases highly infectious. ..." But before that:

"My boy, if there were no disease in the world, there would be no decency. The fear of God. Our illness is a sign of the disapproval of God for what we did. ..."