Schamberg's Well-Known Kissing Party: Mistletoe, syphilis, and other holiday hazards
by Matt Herbison
During the 1920s and 1930s, 4th Year students of Woman's Medical College (WMC)
were required to write a thesis for their Hygiene and Preventative Medicine
class. I've been looking at some patterns running through these theses and
found that between 1928 and 1932, six WMC students wrote papers focusing on
the different aspects of syphilis.
A line in one of these syphilis theses caught my eye and intrigued me. Student
Adele Cohn's 1931 paper makes a reference to "Schamberg's well-known kissing party."
"Schamberg's well-known kissing party" is a phrase chosen by Adele Cohn as a
reference to Jay F. Schamberg's 1911 article "An Epidemic of Chancre of the
Lip from Kissing" (Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol.
57 p. 783, September 2, 1911). Jay F. Schamberg, M.D., was Professor of
Diseases of the Skin at the