What happens when the U.S. Army has more soldiers knocked out by syphilis and gonorrhea than by bullets? In 1863 Nashville, military leaders came up with a desperate — and bizarre — solution: round up hundreds of prostitutes, shove them onto a steamboat called The Idahoe, and ship them out of town.

What was supposed to be a three-day exile turned into more than a month of misery. No city wanted them. The women were dragged from Nashville all the way up the river to Cincinnati and then forced back again — sick, starving, and trapped on a floating prison no one would claim.

After trying every wrong idea, the government finally stumbled into the right one: licensing sex work and opening one of America’s first STI clinics. The result? Infection rates among soldiers plummeted — all without antibiotics, decades before penicillin.

Of course, once the Civil War ended, so did the experiment. A public health breakthrough was discarded, not because it failed, but because society didn’t want to admit it worked.

This is a story of hypocrisy, desperation, survival, and women whose suffering reshaped medicine — even if they never got credit for it.

Join Robert and Anna for a wild ride through history, sex, and medicine — told with the irreverence you expect from Shameless Care. This isn’t a dusty Civil War tale; it’s a reminder that public health has always been messy, political, and very, very human.