A Blood Test for Everyone, the Public Health Service's syphilis screening poster

A U.S. Public Health Service poster catalogued at 1941 sets a test tube of blood across a cluster of faces, young and old, men and women, one of them a Black man and one a baby. It reads "A blood test for everyone, the only sure check" and "Syphilis strikes 1 in 10 before 50" (NAID 513716).

Faces and a test tube

The faces glow out of a dark ground, packed together like a crowd photograph: older and younger, women and men, a Black man among them, a baby near the edge. A test tube of red blood lies across the group at an angle. Four lines of type do the rest.

A BLOOD TEST FOR

EVERYONE

THE ONLY SURE CHECK

Syphilis STRIKES 1 IN 10 BEFORE 50

[imprint:] UNITED STATES PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE

Who made it

The Public Health Service printed its name on the face. The National Archives holds the sheet in Record Group 44, World War II Posters, as 44-PA-267 (NAID 513716). The archive dates it 1941; the transcription shows no printed year.

It belongs to a run of the service's venereal-disease sheets in the same file. Two signed by Karsakov use the slogan "know for sure": one shows a bare arm with a tourniquet and says "get a blood test for syphilis," and the other, numbered VD-17 and printed by the Government Printing Office in 1941, shows a smiling man carrying a woman toward a doorway over the words "get blood tests before marriage".

Who "everyone" means

The archive tags fear appeal and bandwagon. The fear rests on one number, one in ten before fifty, and the poster gives no source, year or population for it. A reader cannot tell whether it is a measured rate or a round figure for effect. The bandwagon is the word "everyone," which puts the viewer in the crowd of faces before he has decided anything.

That same word sets the sheet apart from others in the file. Other venereal-disease posters in the archive point at a type of person: She May Look Clean—But names "pick-ups" and "good time" girls, and Prostitution Spreads Syphilis and Gonorrhea draws one woman in a red glow. This one draws nobody as the carrier. Old and young, white and Black, are shown as people who might simply want to know.

It is also a request. Nothing on the face mentions a law, a penalty or an employer. The premarital sheet in the same series likewise asks rather than orders, and the record does not say whether any state required such tests. On its face, the Public Health Service asked for a test rather than ordering one, and it made its case with a picture of the public rather than a villain.

More sheets from the campaign are gathered in US public health messaging, 1917–1969.