SCXT 320 Science and Racial Prejudice
Consequences of Eugenics--The Contested Etiology of Pellagra--5

At a national conference on pellagra a few days after the Mississippi convict study was released, most researchers leaned towards a "sanitation" hypothesis, focusing on a study containing over 1,000 observations which found a negative correlation between the presence of indoor plumbing and sanitation and the occurence of pellagra. The author of this study cited the statistical techniques of Karl Pearson and Charles Davenport to suport this claim. Goldberger argued that the diets of those with indoor plumbing and sewers differed from those who lived in areas with outdoor plumbing and no sewers (i.e., the poor). Pearson, inventor of the correlation coefficient, lived in England and so did not atend the conference.. His fellow eugenicist Charles Davenport, however, offered a "hereditarian" theory of the etiology of pellagra.

Davenport supported the theory that pellagra was a communicable disease. He claimed that variations in reactions to the infectious agent were caused by "constitutional" differences in people. "Colored persons," he contended (erroneously), " are less subject to the disease on the whole than white persons." Because the presence of mental disorders brought on by pellagra and the severity of the rash varied between families, he maintained that different "blood lines" varied in their susceptibility to pellagra.

Davenport was instrumental in the publication of the final report of the Pellagra Commission, Pellagra III. He dismissed Goldberger's convict study in a footnote, contending that young adult men were "insusceptible" to pellagra. Davenport's data consisted primarily of the so-called "pedigree charts" popular among eugenics researchers, which traced the incidence of the disease across generations within individual families. The eugenists argued that the co-occurrence of these diseases across generations provided evidence for hereditary factors in human failings. They also claimed that "feeble-mindedness" was a hereditary condition that could not be changed by alleviating social misery. further, the "mentally deficient" were less capable of understanding the importance of sanitation (and also more prone to poverty due to their "deficiencies.") Since susceptibility was hereditary, changing the diets of the "unfit" was not warranted. such measures would artificially prolong their existence and lead to their polific reproduction.

Controversy over the origins of pellagra continued until the mid-1930's. Ironically, a national catastrophe was necessary to settle the controversy and eradicate pellagra in the United States.