This condition of widespread ignorance

School Science and Mathematics, Nov 1998 by Oliver, J Steve, Nichols, B Kim

This month Early Days will look at articles and other parts of School Science and Mathematics regarding issues of health and its relation to science teaching. The material for this column is drawn from two randomly selected years of the journal, 1910 and 1930. The health-related topics presented are quite different for the two different years, with issues related to sexual hygiene dominating the health topics of the earlier volume and topics related to nutrition and disease prominent in the latter.

The topic of sexual hygiene was clearly of a controversial nature in 1910. However, four different full length articles were published on the topic during this volume. At the beginning of the first article, an editorial disclaimer spoke to the potential controversy arising from its publication.

The subject of sex hygiene is one that is very much alive at present. Whether Mr. Hahn presents in all particulars the proper method for combating the evils arising out of sex, can probably be better determined after we have experimented more with methods of approach. In the beginning we ought to take warning from our experience in teaching the topic of alcohol and narcotics, and avoid dogmatism, which itself is an evil of the greatest magnitude.

Successful experiments in teaching sex hygiene should be published for the benefit of those teachers who are still casting about in the effort to find a safe way to begin. Let us have more facts and more discussion. Ed. (p. 431)

The article to which this rather liberal disclaimer was attached was written by Clarence Hahn and titled "Sex Hygiene as a Part of a Course in Biology for Boys and Girls tf Thirteen to Sixteen Years." He began,

For several years a course similar to that following has been given with apparently satisfactory results.... Its growth has been gradual and sex hygiene a constant feature through a period of five years. For over a year the principle of "Prolongation of youth" or "Care and protection of young" has been employed for the purpose of emphasizing the true purpose of many sexual processes in animals, especially those that concern the human race. Lack of knowledge of these processes has been the cause of an unnatural and harmful modesty and has involved mankind in vices which threaten the demoralization of society and finally are means of transmitting diseases of a character detrimental to the individual, to the offspring, and to the society in general. (p. 431)

The reader learns about how the course first deals with reproduction in flowers, fish, amphibia, reptilia, birds, and then mammals. In the closing paragraphs, Hahn turns his attention to the moral and physical problems associated with sexual relations.

...Sometimes parents fail to teach their children how to properly care for themselves. Bad health, poor teeth, and immoral habits leading to degradation and death result. Masturbation in early youth may so weaken and destroy the vitality of a boy as to render him a public charge for lifetime. Home conditions may so demoralize a youth as to make him incapable of living in society with the proper moral relation to the opposite sex. In consequence of dangerous venereal diseases contracted through the improper use of the generative organs of both sexes, the protection afforded by any family may be and is continually being turned into a curse upon the children as well as the cause of disease and death of the offending parties. (p. 434)

Speaking specifically regarding venereal disease he continued,

The danger of youth encountering this "Great Black Plague" is due chiefly to their ignorance of its terrible consequences. The fact that 60% of the males of this country are afflicted at some time in the early part of their lives by one or the other of the above-mentioned diseases, is evidence that the sacred law of nature which works for the protection of the young of a species is transgressed, most of all, by mankind. (p. 434)

Hahn's article from the May 1910 issue was followed by another article with a similar title in the June issue. This piece, titled "The Teaching of Sexual Hygiene: Matter and Methods," was written by Winfield S. Hall, who had both PhD and MD credentials. He began by confirming Hahn's notion that bad habits in youth can and will become habitual in adults and that the responsibility "rest[s] upon the shoulders of the parents." But he goes on to report that "statistics gathered from a number of representative colleges in the middle states show that only one young man in twenty receives from his parents any adequate instruction on these subjects before leaving home" (p. 470). He continued,

This condition of widespread ignorance regarding some of the most fundamentally important questions of social life and individual development came gradually to be understood among educators and professional men and women, and finally a representative body of educators, physicians, clergymen, lawyers, and social workers met in New York City four years ago and organized a Society of Social and Moral Prophylaxis, whose object as indicated in the name of the Society was by the dissemination of information to protect the individual and the body social against the dissemination not only of physical disease, which wrecks both, but of those low ideals and vicious customs which make the highest life impossible. (p. 470)