Prostitution spreads syphilis and gonorrhea is a 1944 U.S. Public Health Service poster, VD 16, signed Karsakov. A small woman in a light dress and hat, her skin tinted green, stands in a red glow against dark purple, her shadow stretched beside her (NAID 515252).
What is on the sheet
Content note: the poster names prostitution as the source of venereal disease and draws a woman as its emblem.
The figure is small and alone: a woman in a pale dress and a hat, standing in a pool of red light against a deep purple ground. Her skin is tinted green, and her shadow runs out long at her side. The text is a single sentence and an issuer's block.
Prostitution
spreads Syphilis and Gonorrhea
[signature: KARSAKOV]
[imprint: U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1944-O-577242]
Federal Security Agency
U. S. PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE
VD 16
Who issued it
The sheet names the Federal Security Agency and the U.S. Public Health Service, and carries the code "VD 16." The artist signed as Karsakov; the record gives no first name. The archive lists the audience as the domestic public and the purpose as to warn or inform, under health and home-front themes. It gives no print run and no place of display.
What it leaves out
The archive tags fear appeal, and the colouring does that work: green skin reads as sickness, red light as danger, the dark ground as isolation. The headline states a medical fact in the form of an accusation.
The trouble is whom the picture accuses. A sexually transmitted disease passes between two people. The sheet draws one of them, a woman, and leaves the other out of the frame. The men who paid are nowhere on it. The archive's own description makes the same point: the cause is placed on the woman alone.
A health agency had a real job here, and warning people about syphilis and gonorrhea was part of it. A warning that names one party and spares the other is not neutral information, though. It teaches the public whom to blame. When the state speaks about private conduct, it owes the reader the whole of the facts, and a picture of one person is not the whole.
The same agency appears on this site in a different role, recruiting for the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps in Enlist in a Proud Profession (1943). The Roosevelt administration essay sorts the period's posters by what they asked of the public.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Prostitution spreads syphilis and gonorrhea, 1944. Federal Security Agency, U.S. Public Health Service (artist Karsakov). Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-1587, NAID 515252, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026.
