[Physicians, prostitution, and venereal disease in Colombia (1886-1951)].

Abstract

The article examines the Colombian medical field's fight against so-called venereal diseases between 1886 and 1951, a period when the country was undergoing processes of urbanization, population growth, and the emergence both of industry as well as of a middle class and an urban proletariat. Physicians found a close connection between the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea and the rise of prostitution in cities. At the close of the 19th century, doctors and public health bodies assumed prostitution was inevitable. In 1907 they managed to have it legalized and they opened clinics to dispense mercury therapy and treatment with arsenic compounds. Starting in the 1930s amd 1940s, treatment of venereal diseases was viewed as the State's duty, necessary to protect "la raza" and safeguard progress and civilization. As of 1950, the efficient use of penicillin once again caused the question of prostitution to be posed in more moral and aesthetic terms and brought an end to the regulations groverning its practice, at least in Bogota.