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Goldberger's War: The Life and Work of a Public Health Crusader Paperback – September 1, 2004

by Alan M. Kraut (Author)

4.4 12 ratings

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For fans of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Alan M. Kraut's Goldberg's War tells the story of one doctor's courageous journey to cure deadly diseases and epidemics.

Goldberger's War chronicles one of the U.S. Public Health Service's most renowned heroes--an immigrant Jew who trained as a doctor at Bellevue, became a young recruit to the federal government's health service, and ended an American plague. He did so by defying conventional wisdom, experimenting on humans, and telling the South precisely what it didn't want to hear.

Kraut shows how Dr. Goldberger's life became, quite literally, the stuff of legends. On the front lines of the major public-health battles of the early 20th-century, he fought the epidemics that were then routinely sweeping the nation--typhoid, yellow fever, and the measles. After successfully confronting (and often contracting) the infectious diseases of his day, in 1914 he was assigned the mystery of pellagra, a disease whose cause and cure had eluded the world for centuries and was then afflicting tens of thousands of Americans every year, particularly in the emerging "New South."

“Engrossing story of an American medical hero.” ―The New England Journal of Medicine

Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Hill and Wang
Publication date

September 1, 2004
Dimensions

6 x 0.78 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0809016370
ISBN-13

978-0809016372
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“This book provides a remarkable snapshot of the application of epidemiologic principles to the enhancement public health in the United States in the first third of the 1900s. The author's linkage of the personal life of a "public health crusader" with his scientific discoveries make it a fascinating as well as instructive document.” ―American Journal of Epidemiology

“Engrossing story of an American medical hero.” ―The New England Journal of Medicine

“Inspiring, brilliantly researched and engagingly written. Anyone interested in public health, the politics of medicine, or the impact of Jewish immigrants on American life will savor this book.” ―Jonathan D. Sarna, author of American Judaism: A History

“Alan M. Kraut's fine tribute to him does equal justice in describing the early public health movement in this country, and the Southern political, cultural and economic climate that required change.” ―Jewish Book World

About the Author

Alan M. Kraut is a professor of history at American University. He is the author of Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace, which won the Theodore Salutous Memorial Book Award. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hill and Wang; First Edition (September 1, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0809016370
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0809016372
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.78 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,819,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #727 in Epidemiology (Books)
- #1,975 in History of Medicine (Books)
- #2,077 in Social Activist Biographies

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4.4 12 ratings

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A Southern Reader

A Fine Bio of a True American Hero

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2010

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Joseph Goldberger is a true American hero. He was a US PHS officer who devoted his life to combating various infectious and communicable diseases. However, his biggest triumph was in determining that pellagra, a disease you never hear of any more but in the 19th and early 20th century took the lives of thousands, was caused by a dietic deficiency not a germ or virus. Pellagra was especially prevalent in the US southeast where poor sharecroppers and mill workers often were the victims. The book is very well written and addresses the medical mysteries and the social barriers to implementing Goldberger's suggestions. Alan Kraut has done a real service in preserivng Godlberg's life and work in the book. I think the book will be enjoyed
by those who like biographies and medical mysteries.

7 people found this helpful

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A. Wozniak

A very good read.

Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2009

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The book is well written, very interesting, and easy for a lay person to understand. If you like to read medical history books and don't remember or know about the achievements of Joseph Goldberger, then you should read this book. The book would be a good Christmas or birthday present.

4 people found this helpful

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Renee C. Ozer

Public Health - Science and, Unavoidably, Politics

Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2020

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I get annoyed when today's public health officials act as though Americans are making a tremendous sacrifice wearing masks and social distancing to help defeat Covid-19. It's only a mask! I suspect I'm being patronized. Then I read this book, and I now understand where the public health community is coming from.
Dr. Joseph Goldberger and his colleagues researched pellagra (a horrible condition that led to painful dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and, often, death) in the South, where it hit the U.S. the worst, and soon realized it could not be caused by a microbe, which was then a popular theory among doctors.
Using extremely sophisticated techniques for the time, as well as some human experimentation on institutionalized populations that's fascinating to read about, but ethically disquieting (although it was a different time and they also experimented on themselves), they concluded pellagra was the result of a nutritional deficiency and developed a diet to combat it. The poor (millworkers, tenant farmers, institutionalized people) were the primary victims. Cash crops were often grown on all available land, with no space allowed for tenants' kitchen gardens. When farm commodity prices fell, keeping a cow was unaffordable for these people and their diets were even meaner.
Initially, Goldberger railed against an economic system that resulted in such poverty that people subsisted on cornmeal, fatback, and syrup and thus contracted pellagra, and he suggested ways to get lean meats, milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables into the diets of the poor, and advocated federal and local relief. With continued depressed agricultural prices, he predicted "a veritable famine" on a "starvation diet" that would lead to a high incidence of pellagra in 1921 and 1922.
This resulted in a horrible political backlash. The South was affronted at what it viewed as besmirchment of its honor. Politicians were livid at the implication the South was backward and poor (never mind the terrible toll on generations of the poor of the South). This uncomfortably echoes attitudes in the United States that Covid-19 isn't much of a problem because it primarily affects the elderly and people of color.
The best response to this attitude was that of James Weldon Johnson (Harlem Renaissance writer and cofounder of the NAACP):
"Johnson observed that many southerners were criticizing President Harding for saying what they had long known to be true. According to him, these critics, well familiar with hunger and pellagra in the South, 'nevertheless immediately grew indignant when the matter was stated by the Federal Health Service and the President.' Johnson was especially offended by a statement made by R. W. Hall, the statistician of the Mississippi Board of Health, who said, 'Of the 2239 cases of pellagra shown in the June morbidity report, fully eighty percent are among Negroes chiefly in the Delta section.' Johnson called Hall's analysis 'absurd.' 'If all of the pellagra victims in Mississippi were Negroes,' he wrote, 'the fact would be just as damaging to the health and safety of the State and its population. We wonder whether if smallpox was raging in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, the statistician of the State would say, 'I can see nothing whatever in the situation to cause alarm because eighty percent of the cases are Negroes.'"
Later, a terrible flood hit Mississippi in 1927, sweeping away livelihoods, as well as cows and chickens for domestic consumption, and bringing pellagra. This time, Goldberger was viewed as a savior (the difference being, one supposes, that this time pellagra was a consequence of a natural disaster as opposed to semi-feudal economic conditions.
Goldberger achieved all this and more despite being a poor immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire who came to New York when he was 9 years old. I was surprised to read that he was welcomed warmly by his fiancee's family in New Orleans, despite being Jewish and a Yankee. I was also surprised to read about President Harding's strong leadership in the fight against pellagra.
The book does contain too much about the Goldbergers' marital relationship, though. His fights against infectious and other diseases (yellow fever, malaria, dengue fever, typhoid, etc.) often led to extended absences, and the frequent excerpts of his letters criticizing household management from afar just make him sound like a domestic martinet. Mrs. Goldberger isn't really fleshed out enough to be interesting in her own right. This is probably typical of the period, but it's annoying and doesn't add much to the story.

One person found this helpful

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Chris M.

Interesting

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2012

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Had to read this book for a class in grad school. It provided interesting insight into Goldberger but the tone of the author wasn't very objective

2 people found this helpful

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