This dissertation explores the international response to syphilis before the advent of penicillin in the 1940s. I focus on Argentina and the United States and within these two countries on New York and Buenos Aires. Since Paris, like New York and Buenos Aires, was an important node in a transatlantic system of scientific and policy exchange, I investigate first and foremost the connections between historical actors in France, Argentina, and the United States. My research pushes Atlantic history beyond the turn of the nineteenth century—the traditional ending point for most Atlantic historians—and explores the idea of a multi-centered Atlantic world, where knowledge circulated in all directions and between various nodes. By moving back and forth between different scales of analysis, this dissertation shows how subnational, national, and region-wide networks were imbricated into Atlantic and global circuits. Analyzing the relationship between Atlantic and national networks allows me to underscore the persistence of the national in the transnational. In a number of ways, rather than eliminate national boundaries, the transnational currents I examine reified national differences, as the people who shaped venereal disease control in France, Argentina, and the United States engaged in repeated cross-national comparisons.
International scientific understandings and policy proposals were filtered through local and national concerns, resulting in different outcomes in different parts of the world. More than the demonstration effect, local political and cultural landscapes shaped the relationship between science and public policy. My discussion of sex education programs highlights the impact of transnational discourses on local conceptions of gender and sexuality. Furthermore, informed by shared eugenic concerns, all governments worried about the potential impact of syphilis on the collective welfare of the nation. However, in each case, the precise articulation between medical professionals, scientists, maternalist activists and other social reformers, on the one hand, and municipal, state, and national level politicians and bureaucrats, on the other, determined the ultimate evolution of public health laws and institutions. This dissertation blends transnational history and world history by using the transatlantic history of syphilis prevention as a window onto the formation of modern interventionist states
