Podwójnie wykluczeni? Skazani chorzy wenerycznie osadzeni w więzieniach Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej.
Doubly excluded?
 Convicts suffering from venereal diseases in prisons of the Second Republic of Poland.

Summary/Abstract: In his novel, published in the late 1930’s and entitled “Tip-off”, Marian Czuchnowski, several times detained as political prisoner, painted a particularly striking picture of inmates who suffered from syphilis. To the say of the author, these “syphilitics” were first of all concerned with hiding their condition, as those who were in advanced stages of the disease and were not hospitalized usually found themselves at the very bottom of the prison hierarchy. In 1993 the criminal and biological research was initiated in order to identify in the prison population individuals who were suffering from venereal diseases. The practice came about as a result of the then-social policy labelled as “fight against prostitution” and aimed at reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. However, sources of that time and their analysis may trigger another question, i.e. whether this research was truly about “fighting the prostitution”. It seems that it was also an attempt to identify among socially excluded groups those who were the most marginalized among the marginalized. The venereal disease would be, in real and symbolic terms, the sign of their final and irreversible downfall.

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