VD and the ‘Poor White’ Problem in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

By the time of the First World War doctors were beginning to voice concern about the effects of venereal disease on South Africa’s white population. C. Louis Leipoldt, a liberal Afrikaans poet and doctor, was warned when he began work as a medical inspector of Transvaal schools in 1914 that VD ‘was by no means rare’ among poor Afrikaner children. The Medical Journal of South Africa stated in July 1916 that although no accurate statistics on VD existed ‘there is nevertheless, reason to believe that this prevalence is very real and alarming, and also that it is increasing, especially amongst whites’.² It was estimated in 1917 that 30 per cent of whites had syphilis.³