Penicillin works 95 times out of 100, a 1946 Navy venereal-disease poster

Penicillin for Gonorrhea Works 95 Times Out of 100 is a 1946 Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery poster signed by Charmatz. Most sailors in the crowd are drawn in outline; a few are solid black, and the caption tells the reader he may be one of the failures (NAID 515171).

What the sheet prints

A crowd of sailors fills the sheet, nearly all of them drawn as empty outlines. Scattered among them are a handful filled in solid black, with shadows. The headline gives a cure rate, and then the poster takes the comfort back.

PENICILLIN FOR GONORRHEA

works 95 times out of 100

but ...

YOU may be one of the failures!

How it works

The design turns a statistic into a picture. Ninety-five out of a hundred is good news for a medicine, and the poster states it plainly. The black figures stand for the other five, and the caption points at the viewer: you could be one of them. The archive tags it as a fear appeal, and that is the whole mechanism. The poster does not deny that the drug works. It argues that a sailor should not bet on it.

The figure on the sheet is the Navy's own claim. This page does not check it against the medical literature of 1946, and it does not add numbers the poster does not print.

Who issued it, and the liberty angle

The issuer is plain on the sheet: the Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, working with the Naval Medical School at Bethesda. The audience is the Navy's own men. A military service warning its own sailors about a disease is a reasonable use of a poster, and this one keeps its claims checkable: it gives a number, names the cure, and asks for caution rather than shame. The sailors in the crowd are not caricatured, and, as the catalog describes it, no one outside the crowd is drawn as the source of the disease.

For the wider wartime poster file, see the Office of War Information hub.