Avoid venereal disease, as dangerous as enemy bullets

Prostitution was a cause of concern for a number of reasons during the Civil War. Authorities on both sides saw it, above all, as a public health problem that undermined the war effort. That is the message conveyed by this famous Republican poster, in which this health issue is seen as a terrible threat: “Avoid venereal disease, as dangerous an enemy bullets”.

Created by Darío Carmona, the poster was published in Barcelona by the General Military Health Inspectorate, probably in 1937. The image reflects traditional gender ideas. The provocatively dressed women is the dangerous seductress who drags the innocent soldier down the bad path. In her study of the anti-venereal posters of the Civil War, Carolina Rodríguez concludes that such images “presented prostitutes as symbols of infection and degeneration”.

The prostitutes were blamed when, in fact, the women were responding to male demand. As Eulalio Ferrer, a Republican exile who became a successful businessman in Mexico recounts in his memoir, in Barcelona “dozens of young women hung around the entrance to the Karl Marx barracks, offering themselves for a miserable piece of bread”.

War converted the private into the public. The troops should not squander the energies that the nation needed in order to overcome a momento of crisis. Since the soldiers’ bodies were a tool of war, great care had to be taken not to damage it if the war were to be won. “Health is a weapon”, the title of an article that appeared in the press, captured this mentality. For his part, the poet Miguel Hernández begged the men who were going on leave to be restrained during their rest period, and not go overboard with alcohol, tobacco, or their “masculine condition”.

As the brothels were a threat to be eradicated, the warnings against this “plague” became ever more frequent in the Republican press. There were, in fact, some good reasons for this alarm: some Republican units, lost more men to venereal diseases than to combat. The situation in the Francoist zone was similar. Statistics for the province of Badajoz in February 1938 show that there were more cases of venereal disease than wounds or deaths. This complicated things for the military since, in general, soldiers spent more time in hospital with venereal disease than they did if they were wounded.

FMH