ABSTRACT
A critical aspect of sanitary tactics was the Army medical officer’s ability to safeguard the health of the American soldier. Nowhere was this taken more seriously than in the Medical Department’s campaign against vice. Failure to confront the illicit institutions that promoted sexual promiscuity in civil society, particularly the saloon and brothel culture surrounding military posts, threatened the entire country; as Colonel John Van Rensselaer Hoff cautioned in 1909, “We of the United States have a serious peril confronting us, which threatens national venereal infection.” 1 Promoting total abstinence from alcohol and sex was not easily accomplished. Indeed, all save the most naïve officers believed soldiers would always find their way to the barroom and the brothel.
