[M]edical, public-health, and law-enforcement professionals actively mobilized the fluid power of the reservoir metaphor [...]. [There was a] transition from a pre-Second-World-War paradigm of VD eradication focused on the single major reservoir of female sex workers, to a new paradigm [simultaneously] concerned with [...] “the male homosexual" [...].
VD [venereal disease] had long been tightly linked with prostitution [in European imaginaries] [...]. However, “reservoir” – a word that frequently appeared in North American and British social hygiene parlance from the 1920s onwards – made its distinctive debut in relation to sex work during the First World War, through explicit analogy to tropical medicine’s successes [in imperial territories and colonies].
Milton J. Rosenau’s Preventive Medicine and Hygiene (1913) helped popularize the term [...]. Reservoir began to serve as a synonym for disease [...] to explain “hidden” links in chains of transmission.
By 1918, public-health authorities were attributing to William F. Snow explicit analogies that likened efforts to control VD and prostitution to those undertaken in response to yellow fever and malaria [in the colonial tropics]. Snow was a prominent social hygienist, general secretary of the American Social Hygiene Society, and head of the Venereal Disease Section of the Surgeon General’s Office. “Prostitution constantly replenishes the great reservoir of venereal infection,” noted one official (Kelley 1918:208), “or, in the vivid phrase of Major W. F. Snow, prostitution is to venereal disease what the anopheles [mosquito] breeding swamp is to malaria.” North American social hygienists, law-enforcement officers, and military authorities readily adopted and repeated this language [...] over the next five decades. [...]
Similarly, Snow and Storey asserted that scientific management had “accomplished dramatic and spectacular results” in tackling malaria and yellow fever “by the use of screens and of sanitary procedures for draining swamps and oiling water, thus closing off the feeding places and destroying the breeding places of the mosquitoes that carry these diseases.” They highlighted ongoing “plans for devising analogous social and legal ‘screens’ [… to] keep the human carriers [sex workers] of syphilis and gonorrhea away from their victims [...].
Snow’s comparison was elaborated by Howard Woolston (1921:194) in his investigation of American prostitution before the advent of the First World War:
The prostitute has sometimes been compared to the mosquito, which carries the germs of yellow fever and malaria. It would perhaps be more accurate to regard her as a pool, in which the germs of disease breed [...].
Under Williams’s determined leadership [as Director of British Columbia's Division of Venereal Disease Control], the Division agitated public opinion against commercialized prostitution, pressured the police to target facilitation, and implemented improvements to case-finding efforts. [...] In imagining such a panoptically drained reservoir - one with “total reporting and complete detection” – his logic held that female sex workers might “to a considerable degree account for the common and wide experience of many health centers [...]." In other words, the epidemio-logic of a single major reservoir encouraged Williams and his colleagues to improve their tactics to drain it completely [...].
One study (Kulchar and Ninnis 1938:584) located the sources of syphilis infection for over 1,100 patients attending a California clinic between 1925 to 1936. The authors noted that “[t]he role of prostitution, long regarded as the most important factor in the dissemination of the disease, may be altered considerably by changes in moral standards. With these changes,” they continued, drawing on the phrasing of John Stokes, a leading syphilologist, “the prostitute reservoir may be dwarfed in importance by, ‘the girl friend, the flapper, the industrially emancipated woman, and the recurrently companionate wife.’” [...]
As Canada mobilized for the Second World War, Williams was soon appointed to lead the Canadian Armed Forces’ coordinated VD strategy in Ottawa [...]. News of Williams’s efforts traveled across North America via military, law-enforcement, and public-health networks [...].
Prostitution and the War (Broughton 1943), written by a former worker of Washington’s Federal Security Agency, was one such digest. [...] This text, which mentioned Williams’s successful drive in Vancouver, reasoned analogously from tropical and sanitary medicine to urban VD control:
When any disease attacks, a wise community is not satisfied merely to find and treat cases. Sources must be found, causes eradicated. Malarial swamps must be drained. [...]
[A]n accompanying diagram [...], produced by a prominent American-based pictorial statistics organization, adopted a more confident view. The image quite literally depicts a surging torrent of potential prostitutes being carefully managed and dried to a trickle through redirection, repression, and detention. [...]
A contemporary manual guiding law-enforcement officers on how to deal with prostitution employed similar miasmatic and water-based language:
Police have learned the value of a spot map in determining the hazardous traffic points [of sex workers]. [...] As a public health officer seeks out the source of a health hazard, such as bad water, swamp land, inadequacy of sewage-[disposal] systems, so the law enforcement officer will find the venereal disease swampland by his spot map. (National Advisory Police Committee 1943:21) [...]
The term [...] worked metonymically to narrowing degrees – social hygienists who admired the successes of tropical and sanitary medicine presented prostitution, the individual “promiscuous” woman, [...] as miasmatic swamps of foul water. From the Second World War onwards, this same narrowing of focus would apply with increasing frequency to male homosexuals, and even more specifically to the “passive homosexual” and his rectum. These two lineages were evident when an influential London venereologist summarized in 1962 (Jefferiss 1962:1752): “The reservoirs of infectious venereal disease appear to be the asymptomatic promiscuous female of low intelligence and the infected passive homosexual, whose symptoms are also often non-existent or very slight.”
All text above by: Richard A. McKay, "The 'Reservoir' Metaphor in Anti-Venereal-Disease Campaigns in Mid-Twentieth-Century North America," Medical Anthropology, Volume 42, Issue 4 (2023), pages 415-431. Published online 31 July 2023, at doi. org/10.1080 /01459740 .2023.2196621 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]
