New book explores syphilitic history
Historically, Hot Springs is known for visits by famous gangsters and baseball players, but the town’s history of being a nationwide destination for syphilitics seeking hydrotherapy is uncovered in historian Elliott Bowen’s upcoming book “In Search of Sexual Health: Diagnosing and Treating Syphilis in Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1890-1940.”
In this 232-page book, Bowen discusses how Hot Springs was a “mecca” for syphilitics seeking hydrotherapy for the then-incurable venereal disease prior to the invention of penicillin, the antibiotic that would cure the sexually transmitted disease, in 1940.
According to the book, about 60,000 syphilitic men and women traveled to Hot Springs for treatment, “a phenomenon that
prompted one resident observer to note that ‘to the average layman, Hot Springs, Arkansas, means VD, and VD means Hot Springs.’”
Bowen said prior to 1940, syphilis was “much more serious” and often lethal.
“A lot of the people who went to Hot Springs ultimately died of the disease,” he said. “They went there because they believed bathing in the waters of this place offered them a way of alleviating their symptoms, and they had kind of great hopes when they went to Hot Springs and returning with bodily health restored.”
While he uncovered firsthand accounts in his research of syphilitics who were able to prolong their lives and benefit in both physical and psychological ways from traveling to Hot Springs, Bowen said they ultimately succumbed to the disease.
“I think (coming to Hot Springs) improved their condition in a number of ways, and some of those were physical,” he said. “It seems to be the case that combining baths with drugbased treatment … patients were able to take a greater dose of those drugs, sweat out more of the toxins through natural bodily processes of exfoliation and perspiration; and that did appear to ease the suffering that they experienced dealing with this disease.
“It also offered psychological assistance, (and) this is one of the most interesting findings from my research. The time period in which I’m studying was one in which there was a huge stigma surrounding syphilis. It was thought to be a sinful disease that people contracted due to their sexual immorality.
And, because of that, people with syphilis often experienced a great deal of guilt and shame and anxiety about other people discovering they were infected with this disease.
“By going to Hot Springs a lot of people experienced relief in a psychological sense because they interacted with other people who had the disease, and they learned that this wasn’t something that happened necessarily because you were immoral, they learned that it was more something that happened because you were just unlucky and unfortunate. I think being around other patients, other health-seekers; allowed patients to develop a network of support where they could rely on others in a stigma-free environment to a certain extent.”
Like many, Bowen said he had no knowledge of Hot Springs in existence as a treatment center for syphilis until he started doing research in graduate school.
“My early research led to me to the Philippines … and I read all of these interesting reports in medical journals for the time about this one particular treatment place; it was a hospital in a place called Los Banjos, which is Spanish for ‘The baths,’” he said. “The director of this facility in the Philippines said ‘The kind of treatment that we can offer here is very similar to what a patients experience in Hot Springs, Arkansas.’
“I read that, and I thought ‘Wait, what? Hot Springs, Arkansas? They’re connected with syphilis in some way?’ So just from this one quote from an early 20th-century medical journal in the Philippines in this place called Los Banjos, I got really curious about Hot Springs.”
For the “better part” of the last 150 years, Bowen said he thinks Hot Springs as a town has been trying to “run away” from this history.
“Hot Springs itself, it likes to kind of acknowledge its history as this Wild West frontier town, like you can go to the Gangster Museum, for example, and that’s a part of the city’s history that people are perhaps more willing to acknowledge; maybe in part, because it presents certain commercial benefits, it’s a kind of tourist draw, I guess,” he said.
“I don’t know if people are unwilling to acknowledge it, but even in the period that I’m studying, there is a big clash that takes place in the 1920s and ’30s between the residents of Hot Springs and various federal officials, because in 1920, just after World War I, the government actually created the first federally run free syphilis clinic in the country, and the put it in Hot Springs. Part of the reason they put it in Hot Springs is because they knew that they had a captive audience.
“It ran for a few decades, and almost from the very beginning, there was a lot of opposition from citizens groups who thought that this would give their town a black eye, and prevent people from coming to the kind of pleasure resort that existed in Hot Springs because who would want to go to a place that is just filled with syphilitics walking the streets every day to get their treatment, or going to the hotels or bath houses. And eventually, that opposition led the government to kind of curtail its efforts in Hot Springs.”
Bowen’s book will be available Sept. 29 and can be purchased from Johns Hopkins University Press.