Protect Yourself: Venereal Disease Posters of World War II

There are many reasons it’s great to get things from Steven Heller. The top reason is that he has great things. The second-top reason is that when we’re lucky, he’s written about an item, and it saves us a lot of work. He’s written about this particular item in Print. Here’s what he had to say on July 15, 2014:

Ryan Mungia is the proprietor of the BOYO Press in Los Angeles and an archivist par excellence. The first venture into print publishing, Protect Yourself: Veneral Disease Posters of World War II, sheds light in the shadows of wartime behavior. VD left unchecked could decimate an army. During World War I “an amazing 18,000 American military were incapacitated by sexually transmitted disease each day,” writes Jim Heimann in his introductory essay. But owing to better medicines and sulfa drugs, and an intense anti-VD propaganda campaign, by the height of World War II that number decreased to around 600 per day.

Whether or not graphic design can cure many ills, the posters in Protect Yourself are hard to ignore. Mungia uncovered some well known, but many unknown examples of this anti-scourge material. Although aimed at men who hire prostitutes, there are some that target “girl friends.” Interestingly, none of the posters warn against same sex liaisons.