Goldberger, Joseph

At the time, the medical community widely believed that pellagra was an infectious disease in spite of clear evidence that this was not the case. The hero in this story is Dr. Joseph Goldberger, aphysician in the U.S. Government s Hygenic Laboratory, the forerunner of the National Institutes of Health. Goldberger was correctly convinced that pellagra is a dietary deficiency disease. He made a heroic effort to persuade critics that pellagra was not an infectious disease ... 

Pellagra in the United States is now very rare, the consequence of the good work of Joseph Goldberger and others and of more balanced diets and the vitamin fortification of many foods. 

The discovery, isolation and final synthesis of a whole group of new compounds essential to health in a balanced diet was another triumph of the chemist. These compounds called vitamins A, Ba or G, C, D, E, K, and several others closely associated with vitamin Ba, such as niacin, pantothenic acid, inositol, para-amino benzoic acid, choline, pyndoxine (Be), biotin (H), folic acid and Bn, prevent deficiency diseases such as xerophthalmia (an eye disease), beriberi, pellagra, scurvy, rickets, sterility (in rats), excessive bleeding and so forth. Professors Elmer V. McCollum and Herbert M. Evans, and Joseph Goldberger were among the early American pioneers in this field of research. Drugs, anaesthetics, and medicines like procaine, cyclopropane, dramamme, ephedrine, aspirin, phenace-tin, urotropin, veronal, quinine, and strychnine have been synthesized to alleviate the pains of mankind. The essential... 

Kraut, Alan. Dr. Joseph Goldberger the War on Pellagra. Available from . 

Gay-Lussac s law ga-lo- sak- [Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, 1778-1850, F chemist and physicist]. Syn Charles law. Goldberg DE (2003) Fundamentals of chemistry. McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math, New York. 

In 1914, the U.S. Public Health Service dispatched a team under the direction of Dr. Joseph Goldberger, a physician-researcher, to study the cause of, and hopefully find a cure for, pellagra. In a series of studies initiated in 1914 and continuing throughout the 1920s, Goldberger proved that the disease was caused by a dietary deficiency, and not an infection or toxin. 

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