Medicine: On Dolorosa Street

Every afternoon shortly after 1, a crowd of sleepy-eyed “town girls,” “call girls,” “party girls,” juke-joint dames and dance-hall hostesses gather at No. 513½ Dolorosa St., in San Antonio, Tex. They are girls who entertain many of the 30,000 soldiers at nearby Fort Sam Houston and Randolph Field. But no bawdy house is No. 513½: it is a free clinic where a group of experts are trying a practical new solution for the old problem of venereal disease and the army. Last week an enterprising reporter from the New York Daily News named Carl Warren wrote of the doings on Dolorosa Street.

Instead of running the girls out of town, San Antonio officials ask to see their health papers, pack them off to the clinic. The system is vastly different from the old European routine of slipshod examinations and yellow passports: in San Antonio the girls are given modern treatment. On the second floor they fill out records telling a few facts about their customers. Then they are given a blood test. If infected, they are treated at once to make the diseases non-catching. For gonorrhea, they get sulfathiazole tablets; for syphilis, slow injections of neoarsphenamine and bismuth. Even if not infected, all of the 425 known prostitutes in town report to the clinic once a week.

Every girl is given a supply of a medicinal vegetable and mineral oil, containing an emulsifier and iodine. When spread over vaginal tissues the oil protects her from venereal disease, and if she is already infected it protects her partner. The oil (called Progonasyl) acts as a physical barrier as well as a germ killer, was developed several years ago by a group of scientists at Tulsa, Okla. This is the first mass test of its efficacy.

Founder of the clinic is young Chemist Frank Bickenheuser, one of the original researchers on the preventive oil. To try it out, he went to San Antonio last spring, spent some of his own money, wangled funds from prominent citizens, drugs from the State Health Department. No one protested, for the townspeople were frightened by soaring venereal-disease rates in other towns close to army camps.* Even San Antonio clergymen have not objected to the plan. Most grateful are the girls. Recently some of them chipped in, tried to give Chemist Bickenheuser a donation for his clinic. He turned it down.

*Venereal -disease rates among soldiers were one-third higher in 1940 than in 1939; the rate is still soaring.