Goldberger's War

The Life and Work of a Public Health Crusader

Alan M. Kraut

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780374135379
• eBook ISBN: 9780374606329
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medicine Biographies

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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. “Another Poor Jew”
• 2. Medical Mysteries
• 3. Disease and Duty
• 4. Scourge of the South
• 5. Pellagra, Prisoners, and Pardons
• 6. “Filth Parties” and Mill Meals: Medical Sleuthing in Lab and Village
• 7. Cotton in Crisis and the Politics of Public Health
• 8. “Nailing Pellagra’s Old Hide to the Barn Door”
• 9. Kaddish for a Hero
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Notes
• A Note on Sources
• Index
• About the Author
• Newsletter Sign-up
• Contents
• Copyright