Science Art: Don’t wait – 70% are doomed, c. 1936

27 January 2026 grant Featured, Science Art 0

Scientific illustration of... well, it's a diagram of the percentage of people who are "doomed" if they don't get a syphilis test in time. The diagram just happens to look a little like a petri dish, and a little like a centrifuge used in medical testing. It's very Art Deco, with Bauhaus-style faces inside the circle and a very Modernist grotesque typeface.
Scientific illustration of... well, it's a diagram of the percentage of people who are "doomed" if they don't get a syphilis test in time. The diagram just happens to look a little like a petri dish, and a little like a centrifuge used in medical testing. It's very Art Deco, with Bauhaus-style faces inside the circle and a very Modernist grotesque typeface.

This is a poster from the WPA urging people to save their own lives … by getting tested for a sexually transmitted disease. The geometry of the diagram in the center — the circle lined with Bauhaus-styled geometric human heads, divided into seven-and-three by inverted colors — seems to evoke the equipment used to conduct medical tests: the petri dish, the centrifuge.

I have no idea how syphilis tests were conducted in the first half of the 20th century, but the imagery just strikes me that way, intended or not.

I found this in the Library of Congress WPA Poster Collection.