5 Famed Moments In History Brought To You By STDs

While we don't know whether it was Blackbeard himself or someone on his crew who stuck his prow in an infected port, this isn't empty speculation on our part. Archaeologists recovered a urethral syringe in the wreckage of the Queen Anne's Revenge, with traces of mercury still inside. So clearly, someone was having a good time. Before having a very bad time.

Because doctors are obliged to treat good guys and gangsters alike, Dillinger received 1924's top-notch clap cures, which are enough to make a frat boy celibate. Basically, they injected silver nitrate into the patient's urethra, either by straight-up squirting it into the penis or running a long, thin metal rod run up there. Fun! By the end of his first 90 days in prison, Dillinger tried to escape so many times that officials had extended his overall sentence by a year. And while we're not saying this irrevocably turned him to the life of crime that made him famous, ask yourself how many banks you thought society owed you after you had something forcibly put in your urethra. More than zero, right?

So what difference does it make how Lenin died? Quite a bit. Since he was only 53 when his ticket was punched, it's reasonable to assume he'd have otherwise continued leading Russia for another decade or two. Instead, Joseph Stalin was left to take command. Who knows how things would have shaken out if Lenin had lived? Perhaps Leon Trotsky, not Stalin, would have been his successor.

Prior to his death, Lenin pointed out a number of Stalin's perceived shortcomings, and even recommended that he be removed from office. But Stalin was a devious bastard and easily outmaneuvered Trotsky, even making sure he missed Lenin's funeral by giving him the incorrect date. Once Stalin was officially in power, Trotsky was dismissed, exiled, and eventually assassinated, and Stalin would stay in charge for a full 30 years, during which a bit of game-changing history was made.

Apparently, Hill's West Point education included some advanced "flanking maneuvers," and he picked up the clap while on furlough in New York City in 1844. Since there was no cure for the disease at the time, it had an unfortunate way of cropping up and affecting his performance at inopportune moments. One general described him as a "prodigy" at his best and "disappointing" and "lackluster" at his worst.

Hill spent most of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg unwell and confined to his cot, looking "very delicate" to all who saw him. Things didn't go well in his absence from his men; under strict orders from General Lee not to engage in battle, Hill's subordinates did exactly the opposite. When Lee asked Hill why there were sounds of battle coming from the east, "the obviously ill corps commander claimed ignorance and mounted his horse to investigate." Later, though his corps made up the majority of the famous Pickett's Charge, Hill wasn't placed in command of the action, and also sort of forgot to mention (or simply didn't know) how badly beaten up those troops were. His corps suffered the most casualties during the ill-fated battle, and led the retreat back into Virginia.

Would fresh troops during Pickett's Charge, or a mentally sound general, or a condom years earlier, have resulted in the South winning the Civil War? Hard to say. But we are on board with the condom thing, in case you're furloughing in New York this year.

A whopping 6 percent of all ailments treated in the trenches of World War I were STDs, and without antibiotics to cure the diseases, the impact was fairly grim. In the course of that war, soldiers lost seven million person-days, and the Army was forced to discharge more than 10,000 men for, again, discharge-related reasons.

By World War II, the military wasn't playing around anymore. Seeing as they couldn't eradicate venereal disease with tanks, bombs, or some kind of Dirty Dozen-esque raid, they instead deployed an arsenal of "penis propaganda." Working with the U.S. Public Health Service and the Federal Security Agency, the surgeon general created dozens of posters which featured attractive women warning soldiers about the many dangers of digging in their trenches.

So did it work? Sort of. According to the U.S. Army's Office of Medical History, "the lowest venereal disease rates in the U.S. Army occurred during 1943 and [...] the rates began to rise in 1944, further increased in 1945, and showed marked increases after the cessation of hostilities." So not a raging success story. But speaking of things which weren't raging any more, thanks to advancements in treatment and the STD atom bomb known as "penicillin," by the end of the war, days missed due to illness hit an all-time low.

Yeah! Now who's the "great" war, World War I?

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