For Philandering Time Travelers, A Map Of Syphilis During The Civil War

This 1875 map of the prevalence of sphyilis in the Union draws from one of the U.S. government's earliest sources of big data: Civil War conscription records. In the age before antibiotics, sphyilis rendered an individual unfit for military service. Conscripted men who showed syphilitic symptoms were rejected from the army and exempted from the draft. This map, then, plots out the prevalence of syphilis in a region; it shows how many drafted men per 1,000 expressed signs of syphilis. A time trav...