| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Goldberger's War: The Life and Work of a Public Health Crusader. By Alan M. Kraut. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. xvi, 313 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-374-13537-1.)

In 1915 Earl Brewer, governor of Mississippi, agreed to an unusual proposal to recruit twelve inmates of the Rankin Prison Farm for a demonstration of the role that diet played in pellagra. In an era in which the germ theory of disease held sway, the U.S. Public Health Service researcher Joseph Goldberger believed that such a demonstration was necessary to persuade physicians that the absence of a dietary factor, rather than the presence of a germ, produced "the scourge of the South" (p. 97). As the historian Alan M. Kraut vividly explains in this impressive biography of Goldberger, pellagra truly constituted a scourge. Brewer's risky political decision to pardon those prisoners reflected the fact that the state incidence of pellagra had climbed to nearly eleven thousand cases in 1914. Moreover, the death rate in Mississippi from the disease was the highest in the South. Goldberger's successful induction of pellagra symptoms in six of the prisoners deprived of fresh milk, vegetables, and meat did not persuade all critics of the dietary theory, but it did earn praise from eminent American researchers. For his work on pellagra, Goldberger was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in medicine but did not win.

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