Sifilisul în discursul eugenic din Transilvania, 1918-1948
Syphilis in eugenic discourse in Transylvania, 1918-1948

Summary/Abstract: European Medieval Civilisation was marked at the end of the 15th Century by the first syphilis pandemic which, through the intense military events, became widely spread on Romanian territory, where it lasted for centuries and affected the entire society.The causes leading to syphilis, elucidated only at the beginning of the 20th century, have been steering the imagination of doctors and quacks along the years. They struggled to find a cure for the disease known in Romanian slang under various names. The devastating effects of this malady (both somatically and psychologically), transformed it into a recurrent theme in medical discourses at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20st in Europe, as well as Romania, where the anxiety regarding the degeneration of the race reached alarming levels, due to the appalling biological and social consequences of carrying this disease. Eugenics in Transylvania, dominated by the figures of Iuliu Moldovan and The School from Cluj, after the First World War, managed to conceive a medical project of building the nation on biological and ethnic principles so, within this context, the sanitary welfare of the society became a top priority on their biopolitical agenda, which resulted in extending medical assistance; reorganizing the public health system; regulating prostitution; fighting social and infectious diseases (such as: syphilis, tuberculosis, alcoholism); hygiene propaganda; all in all, cultivating the sense of responsible reproduction, combining thus medical curative practice with prevention, to protect and improve the heredity of the descendants. The constant presence of venereal diseases during the period between 1918 and 1948, mainly in Transylvania but also in the rest of the country, at rates considered worrying by physicians, shows the incapacity of the Romanian health care system to deal with this kind of social pathology which was threatening (in eugenicists’s opinion) the biology of the nation and was believed to have far deeper causes, such as economical, cultural and moral ones. These causes have also been amplified by some external factors represented by The Great Depression and The Second World War.

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