Pellagra Hit African-Americans and Women Hard

“Epidemiologists Explain Pellagra: Gender, Race, and Political Economy in the Work of Edgar Sydenstricker” by Harry M. Marks, copyright 2003 Oxford University Press

Between 1900 and 1940, at least 100,000 individuals in the southern United States died of pellagra, a dietary deficiency disease. Although half of these pellagra victims were African-American and more than two-thirds were women, contemporary observers paid little attention to these gender and racial differences in their analyses of disease. This article reviews the classic epidemiological studies of Joseph Goldberger and Edgar Sydenstricker, who argued that pellagra was deeply rooted in the political economy of cotton monoculture in the South.

In 1920, U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) researchers Joseph Goldberger and Edgar Sydenstricker reported on their ongoing study of pellagra in South Carolina cotton mill villages.1 The study confirmed their previous contention that pellagra was a dietary deficiency disease whose underlying causes were rooted in the economic conditions of the southern United States. Not only was pellagra incidence highest in the lowest income groups, but also it was greatest in districts devoted to “King Cotton,” where monoculture and sharecropping were a way of life.2

The U.S. Bureau of the Census annual mortality reports indicated that African-Americans, despite their lesser numbers, accounted for half of all pellagra deaths, and that women of all colors accounted for 69 percent of all such deaths (Fig. ).4

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/bin/k/e/raceepi.pdf