He swallowed the scabs of the sick to prove what the South would not hear: the epidemic came from a poor family’s plate, not a germ.
On July 1, 1914, at the Baptist Orphanage in Jackson, Mississippi, 136 of 226 children had pellagra, a disease of raw rashes, diarrhea, dementia and, too often, death. Most doctors blamed a germ. Dr. Joseph Goldberger, a government epidemic-fighter who had caught yellow fever, dengue and typhus on the job, noticed what the theory could not explain: the children fell ill, and the staff who tended them never did.
So he gave the orphans milk and fresh meat, and the disease cleared. He made healthy prisoners sick on a corn diet. Then, to silence the doubters, he swallowed the disease’s filth himself. It proved him right, and it made him hated, because a germ was nobody’s fault. Poverty was.
From a Hungarian village to the Potomac
The lifeline
1874
Born July 16 in Giralt, Hungary, now Giraltovce, Slovakia, to sheep herders
1883
Sickness ruins the flock; the family opens a grocery on Pitt Street, New York
1899
Bored in private practice, joins what becomes the Public Health Service
1914
At 40, the Surgeon General assigns him to the pellagra epidemic
1916
Begins the “filth parties” on April 26, injecting and swallowing the disease
1929
Dies of kidney cancer at 54, on January 17, with the missing nutrient still unnamed
By the numbers
The measure of the fight
3 million
Estimated U.S. pellagra cases, about 1906–1940, with some 100,000 deaths
60%
Children with pellagra at one Jackson orphanage when he arrived in 1914
6 of 11
Healthy prison volunteers who developed it on a corn-heavy diet
$700
His estimate of the monthly cost of feeding each orphanage adequately
What he tried, and what it proved
The deeds
1902–06
Fights yellow fever in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Mississippi and Louisiana, and catches it. Dengue in Texas and typhus in Mexico later do the same to him.
1909
Solves an itching epidemic, Shamberg’s disease, tracing it to a mite hiding in the straw mattresses of the city poor.
1914
Feeds the orphans. From September, two Jackson orphanages get fresh meat and abundant milk. By spring 1915 there are no new cases and no relapses. Then the federal money ends, the old diet returns, and by spring 1916 about 40 percent of the children are sick again.
1915
Causes it on purpose. At Mississippi’s Rankin Prison Farm, which had never had a case, volunteers offered pardons eat biscuits, grits and syrup from February to October. “I have been through a thousand hells,” one says. A pardon offered to a prisoner would be called coercion today.
1916
Hosts the “filth parties.” He, his wife Mary and his colleagues take injections of patients’ blood; the men swallow pills of scabs and waste. None gets pellagra. “We just feasted on filth,” he later said.
1927
Sends yeast into a flood. Having found cheap brewer’s yeast prevents the disease, he has the Red Cross ship it down the drowned Mississippi valley, helping hold pellagra back.
Reviled, then forgotten
Recognition
In his lifetime
One physician called the prison experiment “half-baked”; others called it fraud
A doctor accused him of “crucifying” pellagra victims
Congressman James Byrnes called news of famine and plague in South Carolina an “utter absurdity”
Nominated for the Nobel Prize four times, and never awarded it
Today
Niacin, the missing nutrient, was identified in 1937; for a time it was called vitamin G in his honor
Laws during World War II put niacin into American bread
The National Institutes of Health tells his story in its history exhibit
The epidemic is so far gone that he and the disease are both little known
The land that made the disease
The Cotton South
Sharecroppers grew cotton up to their front doors, leaving no room for a garden or a cow. Mill hands were often paid in scrip for company stores stocked with little but meal, molasses and fatback. Goldberger decided the true cure was reform of who held the land. Falling cotton prices and the boll weevil, which forced farmers to plant food, did part of that work without him.
3 Ms
Meat, meal and molasses: the staple diet of the poor
250,000+
Cases a year at the peak, across 15 southern states
7,000
Deaths a year at the peak, in those same states
“I’m only a bum doctor. What can I do about the economic conditions of the South?”
— Joseph Goldberger, to a reporter
