I Should Have Gone to the Pro Station (1944), a Navy dunce-cap poster

A 1944 Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery poster, VP-13, signed Bode. A sailor in a dunce cap writes "I should have gone to the pro station" over and over on a blackboard, a schoolroom punishment used to sell venereal-disease prophylaxis (NAID 514564).

The blackboard

The joke is a school detention. A sailor stands at a blackboard in a pointed cap lettered DUNCE, chalk in hand, with one sentence written six times behind him. His own body covers part of the lines, so the later ones trail off into fragments.

I should have gone to the pro station

[repeated across six lines, partly covered by the figure]

DUNCE

[signature:] BODE

VP-13—Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, U.S. Navy

U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1944—O—615409

Prepared in cooperation with the U.S. Naval Medical School, National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Md.

Who made it

The imprint names the Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, gives the sheet the number VP-13, and credits the Naval Medical School at Bethesda as a partner. The artist signed "Bode," a name that also appears on the bureau's VP-15 and on Lightning Can Strike Twice. The National Archives copy is in Record Group 44, World War II Posters, as 44-PA-1038 (NAID 514564).

Shame, then a remedy

FRAME tags name-calling and fear appeal, and the name is the one on the cap. The poster does not threaten disease directly. It threatens embarrassment: the reader is invited to picture himself as the man everyone laughs at, kept after class for a mistake he could have avoided.

What it asks for is practical. "Pro" is short for prophylaxis, the word the Army spelled out in its 1943 sheet with the Office of War Information, Fight... Syphilis and Gonorrhea: "If exposed, use prophylaxis." Neither service's poster pretends that every man will avoid exposure. The Navy's sheet goes further and assumes he will not, and points him to the pro station afterward rather than to a sermon beforehand.

That is a fair reading of adults. The cost is that the message travels by ridicule, which may make a frightened man slower to report sick; the record does not show how sailors took it. The bureau's own later poster, Penicillin for Gonorrhea Works 95 Times Out of 100, kept the warning but dropped the dunce cap.

The wider Navy, Army and Public Health Service set on venereal disease is gathered in US public health messaging, 1917–1969.