The Inheritance of Syphilis

The mother gazes at her naked, lethargic infant, wan with a pustular red rash dotting his chest. She’s dressed in the fashion of the day: a high-necked black blouse with leg-of-mutton sleeves, a heavy full-length skirt, a formless red feather jutting from her hat. She holds a white handkerchief to her distorted scarlet face, one arm hanging limply at her side, seemingly in despair over the lamentable circumstances that have brought her to this bare waiting room. The Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch worked on his painting “The Inheritance” in the years 1897 to 1899, and the work shocked society with its portrait of a mother and child infected with syphilis. It was a frank and unsettling depiction of the taboos of that time, of sex and sexually transmitted diseases, of infidelity and prostitution. The painting was a grotesque inversion of the classic “Madonna and child” motif, an unflinching look at the transference of the sins of the mother (1).