The “New York Times” in its issue of Saturday morning paid tribute to the late Dr. Joseph Goldberger, Jewish martyr to science, who died in Washington, stricken during his research work.
“While death must come to all, it seems particularly tragic that Dr. Goldberger, who found the cause and cure of a disease from which about 100,000 suffered every year in America alone, should have himself died of a related disease for which no cure has yet been discovered. After fifteen years of study he ascertained that pellagra is definitely avoidable and practically curable. It was assumed for some time that it was a germ disease, but it appeared that it could not be communicated from one person to another-that it was neither contagious nor infectious. It was finally traced to diet and has yielded to a treatment which was arrived at through long experimentation, first with rats and then with human beings. The preventive vitamin PP was Dr. Goldberger’s discovery.
“His last work of rescue on a large scale was at the time of the Mississippi flood, when several tons of his preventive yeast cakes were sent to the region, thus averting a threatened outbreak of the disease. But his vitamin PP will go on saving the lives of thousands, who will never know, as those refuges did, that they have been saved from it by him.
It is of interest that Dr. Goldberger, who brought this great gift to America and to the world, was born in Austria and came to this country as a child, that he was educated in the College of the City of New York, and had his medical training in Bellevue Medical College. He had been for nearly thirty years in the United State Public Health Service. He made original investigations of the causes of several diseases, but his name will always be associated with the one whose banishment from the earth he made possible.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
