He caught yellow fever while tracking it between Mississippi and Louisiana;
dengue by studying it in Texas;
typhus by pursuing it in Mexico.
But pellagra never succeeded in catching Joseph Goldberger.
Born in Hungary in 1874, emigrated in his childhood to the United States then became a doctor at the American Public Health Service at the dawn of the century, the man will nevertheless have spent the last fifteen years of his life scrutinizing this mysterious and dramatic disease. , which then wreaked havoc on poor farmers in the southern states.
Its clinical manifestations?
The "4 D's": dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and death.
The skin becomes red as after a sunburn and becomes rough, even scaly, mainly on the hands, feet, chest and face;
finally, serious disorders of the digestive tract and the nervous system appear.
Observed for the first time in Spanish peasants in 1735, this "leprosy" which, at the beginning of the 20th century, killed 40% of its victims,
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