Goldberger, Joseph (1874–1929)

Joseph Goldberger was the medical detective and pathbreaking epidemiologist in the U.S. Marine Hospital Service (later the U.S. Public Health Service [PHS]) responsible for discovering that pellagra was a nutritional disease. Goldberger's research and controversial experimentation revealed that pellagra could be cured and prevented by eating a balanced diet rich in animal protein or augmenting the diet with brewer's yeast. Later research following Goldberger's death revealed that insufficient nicotinic acid or niacin in the diet caused pellagra.

Born in Giralt, Hungary, on July 16, 1874, Goldberger emigrated to the United States with his parents and three older siblings in 1883 after a plague wiped out the herd of sheep on which the family depended for its living. Among the millions of Jewish immigrants to arrive in the United States in this era, Joseph's parents, Samuel and Sarah Goldberger, opened a small grocery store on New York's Lower East Side. Joseph studied at the City College of New York but soon transferred to Bellevue Hospital Medical College where he received his medical degree in 1895. After several unsatisfying years in private practice in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Goldberger passed an entry examination and was commissioned an Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Marine Hospita lService. He began his career as a federal physician examining immigrants at the Barge Office in lower Manhattan while a scorched Ellis Island was being reconstructed.

Between 1902 and 1906, Goldberger battled epidemics, gaining valuable experience in both field and laboratory. He fought yellow fever in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Mississippi, and Louisiana. While on duty in Louisiana, a colleague, Farrar Richardson, introduced him to Mary Farrar, the daughter of a wealthy Episcopalian New Orleans family and the grandniece of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Although both families initially opposed the marriage on grounds of religious difference, Joseph and Mary married in 1906, deciding that while they eschewed traditional religion, rationalism, humanitarianism, research, and science would guide their lives together. They had four children.

Shortly after his marriage, Goldberger was assigned to the Hygienic Laboratory in Washington (precursor of the National Institutes of Health) to study typhoid fever. Soon, he was off to Texas after an outbreak of dengue fever and back to Mexico to battle typhus fever. For the third time, Goldberger was felled and almost lost his life to the pathogens he studied. Previously he had suffered from yellow fever and dengue while battling epidemics. From his work in the field, Goldberger observed that the diseases individuals contracted were often related to the conditions in which they lived. In his almost daily letters to his wife, Goldberger frequently shared his observations that poverty, ignorance, and poor sanitation made some populations significantly more vulnerable to disease than others.

Dr. Joseph Goldberger was earning a reputation as a hardworking, bold epidemiologist. His study of Schamberg's disease and discovery that its characteristic red rash was actually the result of tiny mite bites earned him the reputation for being clever. Collaborating with PHS physician John Anderson, Goldberger [Page 438]demonstrated that Brill's disease was identical to typhus. In their work on measles, they were able to infect monkeys and learned that the disease was caused by a virus small enough to pass through a Berkefeld filter and that the virus could be identified in a victim's buccal and nasal secretions, but that in patients, infectivity decreased as convalescence proceeded.

...