Dr. Joseph Goldberger & the War on Pellagra
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Introduction
Eighty years ago, long before Dr. C. Everett Koop and a new generation of public health professionals suffered social criticism in their public health pronouncements on AIDS, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, Surgeon in the United States Public Health Service, was doing much the same thing. Even as Koop has been critical of personal behavior and social policies that could put populations at risk of acquiring the AIDS virus, Goldberger warned Americans about the crucial link between poor nutrition as the result of poverty and the onset of a scourge known as pellagra.
Pellagra was first identified among Spanish peasants by Don Gaspar Casal in 1735. A loathsome skin disease, it was called mal de la rosa and often mistaken for leprosy. Although it was not conclusively identified in the United States until 1907, there are reports of illness that could be pellagra as far back as the 1820s. In the United States, pellagra has often been called the disease of the four D's -- dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death. National data is sketchy, but by 1912, the state of South Carolina alone reported 30,000 cases and a mortality rate of 40 percent. While hardly confined to Southern states, the disease seemed especially rampant there. Between 1907 and 1940, aprroximately three million Americans contracted pellagra and 100,000 of them died. A worried Congress asked the Surgeon General to investigate the disease. In 1914, Joseph Goldberger was asked to head that investigation.
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The Bright Young Dr. Goldberger
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Goldberger and the "Pellagra Germ"
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Acknowledgments
This website was written by Alan Kraut, Ph.D., Professor of History, American University and 1996 Stetten Museum Senior Visiting Fellow.
Web site production by the National Institutes of Health Medical Arts and Printing department.
Photography Credits
- NIH physician Dr. Joseph Goldberger's discovery of the cause for pellagra, a disease, resulting from a diet deficient in vitamin B, that killed many poor Southerners in the early part of the 20th century. Photo reproduced with permission of the Joseph Goldberger family .
- Small boy with pellagra. Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine; Man, reproduced with permission of the Waring Historical Library of the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC.
- Dr. Joseph Goldberger. Reproduced with permission of the Southern Historical Collection, Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- Bellvue Hospital Staff. Reproduced with permission of the Southern Historical Collection, Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- Mary Farrar Goldberger. Reproduced with permission of the Joseph Goldberger family.
- Dr. Joseph Goldberger. Seated at a table in a hospital. Photo reproduced with permission of the Joseph Goldberger family.
- Woman suffering from pellagra. Photo reproduced with permission of the Waring Historical Library of the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC.
- Dr. Joseph Golberger with three of his four children. Reproduced with permission of the Joseph Goldberger family
- During World War II, the Merchant Marine named ships after famous Americans. One ship was named after Dr. Joseph Goldberger. Reproduced with permission of the Joseph Goldberger family.
Display Case in Building One
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A comic book about about Joseph Goldberger’s work in pellagra in the early 20th century is available at the Building 1, 3rd floor display case. |