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

8. The Blind Men of Hindustan: “The Diet of the Well-to-Do”

223 C h a p t e r 8 The Blind Men of Hindustan “The Diet of the Well-to-Do” Babcock did well in practice. He set up a clinic and built a small private sanitarium in Columbia. He taught medical students at the Medical College in Charleston.Nora Saunders worked with him until 1919, when she went north to start a new career. Despite success in practice and at teaching, one of his daughters reminisced that “Doctor Babcock never concealed the fact that private practice brought him none of the satisfaction he had felt as a public servant.”1 In February 1914, while Babcock and Saunders were enduring the legislative hearings, Joseph Goldberger replaced Claude Lavinder as the U.S. Public Health Service’s chief pellagra researcher. Within four months Goldberger concluded that diet was the answer. During the 1915 meeting of the National Association for the Study of Pellagra, held at the Columbia asylum, news broke that Goldberger had prevented pellagra by wholesome diet.Ward MacNeal of the Thompson-McFadden Commission and Adams Hayne of the South Carolina State Board of Health emerged as Goldberger’s most vocal opponents.They and others destroyed the goodwill and cooperation that had characterized the American pellagra effort.Goldberger,to win public support, had to disprove the Thompson-McFadden Commission’s conviction that pellagra was in all likelihood an infectious disease.This necessity helped delay by at least several years the demonstration that brewer’s yeast prevents pellagra at nominal cost.Thousands may have died as a result. Babcock remained a diligent student of pellagra and psychiatry until shortly before his death in 1922 from complications of a heart attack.Newspapers and medical journals throughout the United States noted his death The Blind Men of Hindustan “The Diet of the Well-to-Do” 224 Asylum Doctor and the Revista Pellagrologica Italiana praised him as a “pioneer and humanitarian , whose fame will grow with time.”2 A New Start After resigning from the state hospital, according to family tradition, Babcock asked his wife,“What shall I do?”Private practice had always been a barely-viable option for alienists (psychiatrists).By 1914,however,a small niche had emerged for outpatient clinics and small private sanitariums.3 Citizens in Greenville and elsewhere expressed a desire for his services. He chose to remain in Columbia. On March 17, 1914, he opened a practice at “the old H. P. Clark place,”at 2315 Taylor Street. He borrowed money and built his own sanitarium. He and Saunders treated both races and genders as outpatients but limited their inpatients to white women. In 1915 the Board of Trustees of the Medical College in Charleston voted him chair of psychiatry. He thoroughly enjoyed his weekly trips to Charleston by train,which he did without pay until 1918,when the trustees gave him a $500 honorarium to express “very great appreciation of your valuable services to the college.”4 His class usually consisted of no more than five medical students and often involved a case presentation. He also taught nurses at Charleston’s Roper Hospital. Returning to Columbia he would take a trolley to its terminus at Taylor Street and Millwood Avenue and walk the remaining two miles deep in thought.5 August Kohn wrote that it “was a tax for him to go there every week, but he frequently spoke of the happiness it gave him to meet such a group of fine young spirits. Nothing gave him more keen delight than to help young folks.”6 Through his relationships with lawmakers Babcock influenced constructive legislation related to mental health.7 Although no longer at the center of the American pellagra effort, he planned the 1915 triennial conference of the National Association for the Study of Pellagra, another turning point in the conquest of the disease. Joseph Goldberger goes South In early 1914 Claude Lavinder sought relief from pellagra work. He had helped sound the alarm, clarify the extent of the epidemic, and show that pellagra could not be transmitted from humans to rhesus monkeys and other animals,at least not easily.Now his research seemed to be heading nowhere. The Blind Men of Hindustan 225 On February 7, 1914, Surgeon General Rupert Blue asked 39-year-old Joseph Goldberger to assume leadership of the U.S.Public Health Service’s investigation of pellagra. Blue told Goldberger he was “preeminently fitted for this work and . . . it could...