The WPA & the Golden Age · The Public Good
Gonorrhea causes blindness - arthritis, invalidism and misery
Work Projects Administration; Staten Island Case Finding Project, 1939
What it is
A silkscreen public-health poster from the Work Projects Administration's Staten Island Case Finding Project, printed in the late 1930s. Its designer is unrecorded; the Library of Congress dates the sheet to a range, 1936 to 1939, with a June 28, 1939 stamp on the back.
Why it matters
This was government messaging aimed at ordinary New Yorkers during a federal push to find and treat venereal disease, and the project reached for medieval allegory to carry an uncomfortable subject. The knight astride a serpent stages the campaign as a St. George tableau: infection as a dragon to be run through, treatment as the lance. It is health policy dressed as heroic romance, meant to move people toward a clinic rather than away in shame.
What to notice
The sheet runs wide in landscape format, a rare shape in the WPA collection, and the extra bed gives the serpent room to uncoil across the full width.
An old myth conscripted to fight a modern infection.
Provenance
- School
- WPA — Federal Art Project (United States)
- Format
- Political poster
- Poster published
- Work Projects Administration; Staten Island Case Finding Project, 1939
- Source
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division · LCCN 98516061
Rights: CLEAR. Public domain — U.S. government program work (WPA Federal Art Project), any year. Gated by the poster’s own publication year. Cleared by registry on 2026-07-18.
Format
The full-resolution, color-managed file — restored honestly, yours to print and keep.
Sized to protect print quality — this scan supports sizes up to 18x24" cleanly.
Size
$29.00
