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Editorial
One hundred years of STIs: the expansion of venereal medicine through the pages of its journal
  1. Leslie Goode
  1. Correspondence to Dr Leslie Goode, Heythrop College, London W8 5HN, UK; lesliegoode.blogmaster{at}blogs.bmj.com

https://doi.org/10.1136/sextrans-2017-053215

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    For STI journal, this is a centenary year. Not of the original British Journal of Venereal Diseases (BJVD) in 1925, but of the profession for which that journal is an organ. Our profession dates from 7 years before, when the Venereal Diseases Act was passed in 1917.

    Early issues of the journal reveal the distance we have come since the days when the pages of the BJVD were largely dominated by issues around the management of ‘the clap and the pox’.

    But we can also trace through the pages of the journal the evolution of that remote world into the STI world that we know today. Where, for example, did all those other conditions that we know today come from? And when did they first make their entry onto the stage of STI medicine?

    This centenary is an occasion to look back briefly over the key stages in this process, though the lens of the journal.

    1938–1950: the old medical conditions become curable

    With little apparent warning, the era of relatively ineffective treatment passes. Hanschell first reports sulphonamides as an effective cure for gonorrhoea in 1938.1 This announcement is followed by a torrent of papers in the …

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    Footnotes

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.