SCXT 320 Science and Racial Prejudice
Consequences of Eugenics--The Contested Etiology of Pellagra--6

Goldberger spent the rest of his life (he died of cancer in 1929) trying to identify the specific Pellagra Preventive nutritional elemnt. After the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression drove many people into unemployment and poverty. Eugenic beliefs in social success as an indicator of hereditary quality were undermined by the national economic catastrophe. Government food relief programs and the manufacture of enriched flour all but eradicated pellagra. The disease is now known to be caused by a deficiency in the Pellagra Preventive elemtn, now known as niacin. As the following table demonstrates, however, deaths from pellagra continued to rise after 1915. It was the widespread poverty of the Depression that led to the policy changes that eradicated pellagra in the United Staes (and other developed countries).