Sex Madness was a curious 1938 sexploitation film that claimed to warn of the dangers of syphilis but was really an excuse to show risqué sex scenes that would have otherwise been banned by the film censors of the time.
As you might expect, watching the film now it seems remarkable that anyone would see anything in it worth censoring, but the concern about ‘sex madness’ was not entirely fictional.
Untreated syphilis typically leads to neurosyphilis where the disease attacks the nervous system and leads to dementia and madness.
It has been with us for possibly thousands of years and there is a rule of thumb that for any famous figure who died ‘mad’ before the 1950s someone will have suggested they died of syphilis.
However, it was truly a nasty way to go and a genuine danger considering that the first safe and effective antiobiotic treatments were not widely available until after World War Two.
For a long time before then, the most effective treatment was to be infected by malaria which would give you a fever so strong that the syphilis bacteria would die in your body due to the high temperature. The hope was that the malaria could be treated by quinine before you died from that. The discovery won Julius Wagner-Jauregg the Nobel prize in 1927.
So when the ‘sex madness’ film was made there was a genuine need to warn people about syphilis although the ‘madness’ angle gave the producers an excuse to show people acting ‘crazily’ and going ‘wild’ while melodramatising the effects of syphilis and ‘immoral behaviour’.
The whole film is now in the public domain and it is remarkable as a historical document, for the appalling acting and for its awesome film poster.
Link to ‘Sex Madness’ on YouTube.
Link to ‘Sex Madness’ on archive.org
Mind Hacks 