# ‘Suffering for the sins of others’: Lucius D. Bulkley, Syphilis Insontium, and disease destigmatisation in the progressive era United States

## TL;DR

This paper explores early 20th-century efforts to reduce the stigma of syphilis by reframing it as 'innocent' disease, and how these efforts had mixed and unintended consequences.

## Contribution

The paper highlights Lucius Bulkley's pioneering but flawed attempt to destigmatize syphilis and its influence on later stigma reduction campaigns.

## Key findings

- Bulkley's 'syphilis insontium' concept initially gained medical support but later faced backlash for reinforcing stigma.
- The idea of 'innocent syphilis' continued to influence stigma reduction efforts despite its problematic legacy.
- Early 20th-century anti-stigma rhetoric often unintentionally reinforced moral judgments about patients.

## Abstract

Historical research on efforts to reduce the stigma associated with venereal disease (VD) generally dates these campaigns back to the 1930s. Within the United States, one of the earliest attempts to detach VD from its traditional association with sexual immorality occurred during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, when the New York City dermatologist Lucius Bulkley coined the term syphilis insontium (‘syphilis of the innocent’) in the hopes of demonstrating that many of those who contracted this disease did so through non-sexual contact. Gaining widespread acceptance within the medical community, Bulkley’s ideas served as the intellectual foundation for a discursive assault on the prevailing belief that syphilis constituted the ‘wages of sin’—one designed to destigmatise the disease and to promote more scientific responses to it. However, the effects of this anti-stigma rhetoric were often counterproductive. Encouraging doctors to discern ‘innocence’ or ‘guilt’ through assessments of a patient’s character, syphilis insontium often amplified the disease’s association with immorality. With the passage of time, physicians became increasingly aware of these problems, and in the 1910s, a backlash against Bulkley’s ideas emerged within the American medical community. Yet even with the resultant demise of his destigmatisation campaign, discourses of ‘innocent syphilis’ continued to circulate, casting a long shadow over subsequent stigma reduction efforts.