Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellagra

This biography of an early twentieth-century South Carolina doctor sheds light on his pioneering work with the mentally ill to combat a public health scourge. 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."