Scene from the Federal Theatre Project's production of
Spirochete, in Seattle, 1939, which intervened in Seattle's
public health debates around venereal disease. (Courtesy of the
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
Division, UW Theatres Photograph Collection, (PH Collection
#236), box 4, folder 17.)The single most successful of all of
the Seattle Federal Theatre Project productions was a Living
Newspaper about a sexually transmitted disease. Spirochete
presented the history of syphilis, from Europe’s initial contact
with the disease (probably brought back by Columbus’s men from
the New World) and its virulent spread, to the discovery of both
the spirochete bacterium that caused the disease and the
discovery and development of salvarsan, its first effective
medical treatment, in 1908. The history lesson was framed by
contemporary events in the United States: a raging debate about
efforts to institute mandatory prenatal and premarital testing
for the disease. For, though the discovery of sal