"In 1914, the United States Marine Hospital Service (USMHS), foreunner of the U.S. Public Health Service, assigned Joseph Goldberger, M.D., to investigate. Goldberger, the industrious son of Jewish immigrants and an 1895 honors graduate of Bellevue Hospital Medical School, doubted that pellagra was a Black disease; in addition, he did not believe that it was infectious, because he had noted that the patients but not the staff of institutions tended to contract it, and infections tend to be more democratic.
He decided that the ultimate proof of the disease's noninfectious, nonracial nature would lie in inducing pellagra in healthy white people. He did this by limiting a group of white jail inmates to a strict diet, one similar to that on which poor Blacks had subsisted for centuries. Because they developed the disease, Goldberger was able to demonstrate that pellagra was not infectious, but a deficiency disease that affected Blacks and whites alike.
Goldberger had divorced pellagra from race, but unfortunately, this revelation was resented and ignored. The nutritional, nonracial nature of pellagra became forbidden knowledge, just as the refutation of the 1840 census had been. As a result, this easily preventable disease remained epidemic until 1940."
Chapter 6- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
