Often, city fathers blamed prostitutes for the disease, and some threatened to brand their cheeks with hot iron if they did not desist from their vices.

In 2007 Allen donated his collection of safe sex pamphlets to the Fales Library at NYU. Peter Lewis Allen (born 1957) is a scholar author and educator. He worked at McKinsey & Company in New York from 2000 to 2007 when he moved to San Francisco to become the Director of Google University (Google Inc.