Joseph Goldberger

Joseph Goldberger arrived on the Lower East Side at nine, the youngest of six children in a Jewish family that had left the Hungarian countryside for Manhattan tenements. He enrolled at City College intending to become an engineer, and a chance encounter in 1892 pushed him toward medicine instead. He earned his degree from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1895, tried private practice in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and found it too quiet. In 1899 he joined the Marine Hospital Service, inspecting immigrants at the Port of New York, then spent the next several years chasing yellow fever, typhus, dengue and typhoid through Mexico, Puerto Rico, Mississippi and Louisiana, the apprenticeship for an epidemiologist willing to go wherever the disease was.

Assigned to pellagra in 1914, when the disease was killing an estimated forty percent of the Southerners it struck, Goldberger ran the experiment that mattered: he switched the diets of a Georgia orphanage and a Mississippi asylum onto fresh meat, milk, eggs and vegetables, and the disease all but disappeared. To rule out contagion he needed the opposite result too, so in 1915 he fed eleven volunteers at a Mississippi prison farm nothing but the region's corn-heavy diet until five of them developed the disease. In 1916 he went further, holding what the press called filth parties, injecting pellagra patients' blood into sixteen volunteers, himself and his wife included, across seven separate trials, and none of them got sick. He had proved the cause was diet. He never lived to name the missing nutrient.

The prison study extracted a price from men with no real way to refuse it. Mississippi's governor granted pardons in exchange for eleven volunteers from Rankin State Prison Farm, and when the corn-only diet wore them down and some tried to quit, they were not allowed to. Southern newspapers and legislators, meanwhile, treated "a disease of poverty" as an insult rather than a diagnosis, and mainstream medicine, committed to germ theory, was slow to accept a cure that involved food instead of a vaccine. The methods outlived the man in an uglier way than that: at the Nuremberg Medical Trial in 1947, a Nazi researcher cited a popularized account of the prison experiment as part of the reasoning behind his own work on captive human subjects.

Goldberger died of kidney cancer on January 19, 1929, at fifty-four, nominated for the Nobel Prize four times and never awarded it. Congress voted his widow a pension of one hundred twenty-five dollars a month, an acknowledgment his employer had never quite managed while he was alive. The piece he had spent fifteen years chasing, the specific missing nutrient, was identified eight years later, in 1937, when Conrad Elvehjem traced pellagra to a deficiency of niacin. Public health campaigns built on that finding all but eliminated pellagra from the United States within a generation, using a diagnosis Goldberger had made and a molecule he never got to name.

Joseph Goldberger's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Orphanage and asylum diet-reversal trials discovery
  Switched institutional diets to fresh meat, milk and vegetables and reversed pellagra 1914
• Rankin State Prison Farm pellagra-induction trial discovery
  Induced pellagra in volunteer prisoners on a corn-only diet 1915
• Filth party self-experiments discovery
  Injected pellagric blood into himself and 15 volunteers to rule out contagion 1916
• Reports to the Surgeon General on pellagra etiology article
  A series of Public Health Service reports establishing the dietary cause 1914

• July 16, 1874 aged 0 Born in Girált, Kingdom of Hungary
• 1883 aged ~9 Immigrates with his family to New York's Lower East Side
• 1895 aged ~21 Earns his M.D. from Bellevue Hospital Medical College
• 1899 aged ~25 Joins the U.S. Marine Hospital Service
• 1914 aged ~40 Assigned by the Surgeon General to investigate pellagra
• 1915 aged ~41 Runs the Rankin State Prison Farm pellagra-induction trial
• 1916 aged ~42 Conducts the filth party self-experiments
• 1928 aged ~54 His research is popularized in Paul de Kruif's Hunger Fighters
• January 19, 1929 aged 54 Dies of kidney cancer in Washington, D.C.

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