Sexually Transmitted Diseases: Travelling Through Space and Time

In this report we present an historical review on the evolution of STDs in different regions of the world to highlight the most characteristic factors involved in the propagation and/or the fall of STDs during the centuries and all over the world. We selected a certain number of articles as a result of a bibliographic research on MEDLINE database (January 1966 — September 1997), using the keywords “sexually transmitted diseases” and “genitourinary diseases” crossed with “history of medicine”, from the ancient times to 20th century. One hundred and four articles were found pertinent for this study. The number of publications concerning STDs in the pre-Aids and Aids-era were not numerically different. During the period 1966–1984 (still pre Aids-era) of the 58 publications selected, 40 (68,96%) were found in north-east European journals (mostly from Russia, Germany and Poland) and these publications analyzed exclusively the history of STDs in each individual country. On the contrary, during the Aids-era, there has been a considerable increase of publications in American and Western European journals, which examined the evolution of STDs not only in their own countries, but in Africa and Asia as well. Only 33 articles 1–33 of original 104 were further selected and analyzed for their completeness and possibility to best describe the historical and geographical situation of STDs in the various regions of the world.