Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellagra
420
Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellagra
420eBook
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Overview
Thousands of Americans died of pellagra before the cause—vitamin B3 deficiency—was identified. Credit for solving the mystery is usually given to Dr. Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service. But in Asylum Doctor, Charles S. Bryan demonstrates that a coalition of American asylum superintendents, local health officials, and practicing physicians set the stage for Golberger’s historic work—chief among them was Dr. James Woods Babcock.
As superintendent of the South Carolina State Hospital for the Insane from 1891 to 1914, Babcock sounded the alarm against pellagra. He brough out the first English-language treatise on the subject and organized the National Association for the Study of Pellagra. He did so in the face of troubled asylum governance which, coupled with Governor Cole Blease’s political intimidation and unblushing racism, eventually drove Babcock from his post.
Asylum Doctor describes the plight of the mentally ill in South Carolina during an era when public asylums had devolved into convenient places to warehouse inconvenient people. It is the story of an idealistic humanitarian who faced conditions most people would find intolerable. And it is important social history for, as this book’s epigraph puts it, “in many ways the Old South died with the passing of pellagra.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611174915 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of South Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 04/13/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 420 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Charles S. Bryan is the Heyward Gibbes Distinguished Professor of Internal Medicine Emeritus at the University of South Carolina. His extensive publications deal mainly with infectious diseases, medical history, and medical biography. He is a Master of the American College of Physicians and a recipient of the Order of the Palmetto.
Table of Contents
Illustrations xiii
Preface xvii
Prologue xxiii
Chapter 1 Jimmie 1
A Chester Boyhood 1
Phillips Exeter Academy 4
Harvard College-and the Race of His Life 6
Harvard Medical School 12
McLean Asylum 17
Coming Home against Better Judgment 21
Chapter 2 Superintendent 25
Psychiatry in the Late Nineteenth Century 25
The South Carolina Lunatic Asylum 27
Taking Charge-More or Less 32
Kate Guion 37
Benjamin Ryan Tillman and the Sea Islands Hurricane 40
Tuberculosis in Asylums 45
"The Colored Insane" 48
Race and Gender 51
Dumping Ground 58
Restless Man 65
Alienist 68
Citizen 74
Chapter 3 Founder of the Movement 77
What We Know Now 77
What They Knew Then 81
First Cases 88
Travels with Tillman 92
The First Pellagra Conference-Columbia, South Carolina, 1908 96
The First Statistics and the First Laboratory, 1909 102
The First National Conference on Pellagra, 1909 105
Chapter 4 How Bad It Was 113
The Allegations 113
Niels Christensen, Jr. 115
Eight Days of Testimony 119
The Majority Report 126
The Minority Report 137
Showdown 138
Aftermath 141
Chapter 5 Sambon's Obsession 143
Marie's Pellagra 143
An American Competence in Pellagra 147
Historian of the Movement 149
Epidemiologist, Clinician, and Teacher 152
Lavinder and Siler Stake Out Positions 159
Joseph Siler and the Two Commissions 162
Claude Lavinder and the U.S. Public Health
Service 166
Chapter 6 So Near, So Far 173
Casimir Funk and the "Vitamine" Hypothesis 173
The 1912 Triennial Conference-Sandwith Comes Close 176
Did Babcock and Carl Alsberg Almost Get It Right? 182
Sambon's Spash in Spartanburg 186
Paradigms, Personalities, and the Tragedy of Casimir Funk 188
Chapter 7 A Plain Farmer's Daughter 193
State Park 194
Nora Saunders and Cole Blease 197
Dr. Saunders, Dr. Cooper, and the Wassermann Test 203
"Like Burnished Steel" 208
The Higher Tribunal 211
Vindication 219
Resignation 220
Chapter 8 The Blind Men of Hindustan 223
A New Start 224
Joseph Goldberger goes South 224
The 1915 Triennial Conference-"The Diet of the Well-to-Do" 233
Sambon's Sad Legacy 241
"The Dreams of our Youth" 250
Postscripts 253
Perspective: Asylum Doctor 259
Babcock as Administrator 260
Babcock as Leader in Response to the Pellagra Epidemic 261
Babcock as Exemplar of Character Traits Worthy of Emulation 262
Asylum Doctor 264
Appendix 1 Mortality and Full Recoveries (as Percentages of Patients Treated) by Race, South Carolina State Hospital for the Insane, 1891-1914 265
Appendix 2 Parallels in the Histories of Beriberi and Pellagra 267
Appendix 3 A Chronology of Pellagra and Niacin 269
Appendix 4 Summary of the Four Major Pellagra Conferences held at the South Carolina State Hospital for the Insane, 1908-1915 277
Notes for Researchers 279
Abbreviations Used in Notes 283
Notes 285
Bibliography 355
Index 389
What People are Saying About This
Asylum Doctor is a three-course feast—a biography, an asylum history set in the Deep South, and a story of the American encounter with pellagra—served by an author who blends high degrees of medical expertise and historical skill. A gourmet offering in the history of medicine.
A thoroughly researched and engagingly written study and a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of mental health care in the South. The chapters dealing with Babcock's important role in the search to understand pellagra are especially notable. After reading them, I felt that I understood the epidemiological history of this terrible nutritional disease for the first time. They also provide an object lesson in how science is sometimes sidetracked by the force of personal, social, and cultural influences.——
Years before the U.S. Public Health Service assigned Joseph Goldberger to discover the cause and cure of pellagra in 1914, James Woods Babcock, superintendent of the South Carolina State Hospital for the Insane was a pioneer in pellagra studies. In this compelling biography, Charles Bryan offers the previously untold story of how Babcock initially sounded the alarm about pellagra in the United States and used his considerable organizational skills to gather those needing to know more about the dread disease that some called the scourge of the South.
Bryan's story of James Babcock, the state mental institution, and the battle against pellagra is not only an outline of an important era in South Carolina history, but also a testament to the medical knowledge, scholarship and commitment of the author.
An extremely well-done biography of an important but neglected figure in the history of the care of the mentally ill in the United States...
A beautifully written, erudite, deeply human story of a flawed hero. Bryan presents Babcock as modest, talented, goodhearted, and dedicated to medicine but ill-equipped to deal with the politics of running an asylum, and overly reticent about his role in the evolving history of pellagra. The reader is quickly absorbed in fights about money, medical science, asylum management, and the fates of the various participants involved. A tour de force.