"S" is for Spartanburg Pellagra Hospital

"S" is for Spartanburg Pellagra Hospital. The pellagra hospital in Spartanburg was the nation’s first facility dedicated to discovering the cause of that baffling and serious disorder. In 1914, with a special congressional appropriation, the U.S. Public Health Service established the hospital primarily as a research facility. Dr. Joseph Goldberger, an epidemiologist, needed a clinic to conduct metabolic studies on pellagra to establish dietary deficiencies as the cause of the disease that had reached epidemic proportions. Some 1,306 South Carolinians died of the disease in the first ten months of 1915; in 1916, more than 100,000 southerners were infected. By the time the Spartanburg Pellagra Hospital closed in 1921, the facility had helped scientists prove the dietary basis of pellagra and enabled hundreds of South Carolinians of the upstate to rid themselves of a life-threatening disease.