I give you “Sex Madness,” a 1938 exploitation movie disguised as a PSA warning its viewers against syphilis. You can watch it here on YouTube if you have an hour to kill. But what I love most about this movie is not the movie itself, which is woefully un-exploitative to modern sensibilities, but the fact that the movie was actually made as “an excuse to show risqué sex scenes that would have otherwise been banned by the film censors of the time.”
Antibiotics used to treat syphilis weren’t readily available until after World War Two, so the PSA was most certainly necessary — untreated syphilis leads to dementia and eventually death. Interestingly, before antibiotics were available as a treatment,
the most effective treatment was to be infected by malaria which would give you a fever so strong that the syphilis bacteria would die in your body due to the high temperature. The hope was that the malaria could be treated by quinine before you died from that. The discovery won Julius Wagner-Jauregg the Nobel prize in 1927.
via Mind Hacks
