Paul de Kruif: A Michigan Leader in Public Health

Paul de Kruif: A Michigan Leader in Public Health by Jan Peter Verhave In the mid-twentieth century, the Michigander Paul de Kruif was a nationally known figure in the science of health and disease. De Kruif (1890-1971), a descendant of immigrants from the Netherlands, was born and raised in Zeeland, Michigan. He began his career as a bacteriologist at the University of Michigan, and in 1920 he joined the prestigious Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. In addition to his work in the biomedical sciences, he mingled and socialized within various literary circles and befriended Clarence Day, Henry L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and, in later years, Ezra Pound, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway. De Kruif’s interest in writing proved beneficial. In 1922 he stopped working in the laboratory, and from that time onward he devoted himself to writing about medical history, distributing medical news, pushing public-health rallies against various diseases (e.g., tuberculosis, syphilis, and polio), and advocating for health reform. Because De Kruif had suggested that part of the money raised to treat and fight polio be invested in research, President Roosevelt personally appointed him as scientific secretary of the antipolio campaign. Writing for a broad reading public, De Kruif’s first major success came with his book Microbe Hunters (1926), a landmark in the history of science that presented the stories of the first discoverers of disease agents, ways of transmission, and effective drugs for treatment. Hundreds of doctors, including several Nobel Prize winners, have described how reading this book helped them decide to study medicine. Subsequently, De Kruif exposed the medical abuses the poor suffered during the Depression. Until the late 1950s he heralded healthpromoting discoveries. His work was important because he was sufficiently radical to break out of traditional thinking about culture, society, religion, medicine, and many other issues; yet, he was also able to describe clearly the significance of new scientific findings to a public audience he sometimes hated (including the conservative Calvinists THE MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 39:1 (Spring 2013): PP 41-69.©2013 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 42 The Michigan Historical Review in his hometown Holland and nearby birthplace, Zeeland). Like many Progressives, De Kruif represented an entire class of disaffected scientists in the 1930s that turned to the political left and favored healthcare reform, including some degree of government involvement. These scientists’ work revealed how farmers in the Midwest and the urban poor suffered from the decade’s economic crisis. De Kruif’s other crusade was to inform the public at large about developments in medical science, and thus make people aware of new solutions to their illnesses. He was seen as a propagandist, even an evangelist, giving hope to hundreds of thousands who read his articles about cures for their ailments in popular magazines, instead of waiting to get such information from their private physicians. De Kruif published approximately 300 articles and a dozen books over a period of four decades, which made him a well-known figure nationwide but a nemesis to many conservative physicians. He in turn was annoyed by their ignorance and the long time it took before they prescribed new technical treatments or drugs. For most of his writing career De Kruif was “at sword’s point” with the American Medical Association (AMA) and its support of the status quo and rejection of health reform, as well as its reluctance to exploit new avenues to promote public health.1 But he also highlighted those medical doctors and public-health workers who did their best to relieve suffering, many of them in his own state. He presented their disease-fighting and community-health efforts to the reading public, revealing the unselfish work of scientists in laboratories and physicians among the common people. He deftly packaged his public-health advocacy in rhetoric that was accessible to his broad popular audience (i.e., acceptable across divisions of religion, race, and ethnicity) and smartly attuned to the politically charged, Depressionera debates over health-care policy. At the end of the 1930s, as the argument over health reform raged and Congress rejected several proposals, he organized a group of five...