SCXT 320 Science and Racial Prejudice
Consequences of Eugenics--The Contested Etiology of Pellagra--2

Early investigations of the Etiology of Pellagra

In the early years of the 1900's investigators began to discover cases of pellagra in insane asylums and started to explore the incidence of this malady in nonistitutionalized populaitons. The origins, causes, and effective treatments for this conditian were uncertain and subject to debate among physicians and medical researchers. Among the competing causal hypotheses were:

• eating too much or uncured corn
• microorganims carried by flies
• corn fungus
• side effects of syphilis
• infectious agents found in unsanitary living environments

Evidence was slowly emerging, that led some investigators to suspect that a poor diet might be responsible. By 1912, however, Dr. Edward Jenner Wood, chairman of the Pellagra Commission of the North Carolina, concluded that "insufficient nourishment" was not a cause. Five facts were known:

1. Advances in diagnostic technology had led to the identification of tens of thousands of cases that had been misdiagnosed as malaria, syphilis, anemia, or scurvy.
2. Resistance to other illnesses was lovered when a person sufered from pellagra.
3. Pellagra occurred most freequently in border and Southern states.
4. Pellagra harmed the textile industry because mill workers were in chronic ill health and suffered from frequent absenteeism.
5. American corn was having difficulty securing European markets because of a widespread belief that corn caused the disease.

Because hookworm and roundworm infestations frequently accompanied outbreaks of pellagra, the previaling belief was that the disease was a result of toxic or infectious agents and was highly communicable.