Goldberger's Filth Parties: Injecting Pellagra Blood to Disprove a Germ

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In 1916 Dr. Joseph Goldberger, his wife Mary and his assistant injected themselves with the blood of pellagra patients and swallowed their secretions, all to prove they could not catch the disease. This episode follows how he got there. Born in 1874 to a Jewish family in Hungary, he arrived in New York in 1883, grew up on the Lower East Side, started out in engineering at City College, and earned his M.D. in 1895. As an officer of the Marine Hospital Service he inspected immigrants at Ellis Island and fought yellow fever in Mexico, typhus in Puerto Rico and dengue in the South before Surgeon General Rupert Blue assigned him to pellagra in 1914.

By 1912 South Carolina alone was reporting 30,000 cases, and the medical establishment was sure a germ was to blame. Goldberger noticed that hospital staff never caught it, changed the diets at orphanages and the Georgia State Sanitarium with dramatic results, and then ran a prison trial that still raises hard ethical questions. Even after the filth parties, critics kept moving the goalposts.

Two orphanages where 172 children had pellagra, and only one new case appeared in two years on a better diet
Asylum patients with dementia who recovered so fully that they were discharged
Governor Earl Brewer's pardon deal at the Rankin State Prison Farm, where five of 11 men had pellagra by six months and some were refused permission to quit
Seven filth party trials with 16 volunteers, and not one case of pellagra
Four Nobel Prize nominations, a pension for his widow, and Nazi defendants at Nuremberg citing Paul de Kruif's account of his prison experiment

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