pellagrah

4. Synthesis and extensions TBA

5. Connections and resources Harkness, J. M. (1996). "Prisoners and Pellagra." Public Health Reports 111(September/October): 63–467. > Goldberger is the hero in Chase's chapter. Harkness makes us think about a dimension of Goldberger's work not highlighted by Chase. How does it affect you to see that dimension if it had not concerned you before reading Harkness?

Marks, H. M. (2003). "Epidemiologists Explain Pellagra: Gender, Race, and Political Economy in the Work of Edgar Sydenstricker." Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 58(1): 34-55. > Marks adds additional dimensions to our understanding of research that Goldberger began and was continued by his collaborator Sydenstricker through the 1920s. > Goldberger, a US Public Health Service doctor who showed the connection between diet and pellagra through observation and experiments with a prison population, also worked with Sydenstricker in the mid-1910s to show the association in data derived from 7 mill towns in S. Carolina. The association was clear against income per adult male equivalent (with nutritional needs of wives and children set lower). They did not go beyond this statistic to examine distribution within households and shed no light the higher incidence of pellagra among women. In subsequent work on sharecroppers and tenant farmers in Mississippi, Sydenstricker examined the annual and debt-related restriction on food supply but made no distinction between whites and blacks and shed no light on the disproportionate incidence of pellagra among blacks. Marks concludes that, by distracting attention from gender and racial inequalities, "research methods and traditions, no less than overt ideologies, played a role in maintaining the subordinate social position of women and African-Americans in the southern United States" (p.34). There is more to Marks' account, including the more pluralistic idea of race in the areas of high immigration in the industrial Northern USA and access to fresh foods in some villages but not the strict mill towns.

5b. Add to this [|blog post] to make contributions to the revision of the chapter above or to an annotated collection of readings and other resources related to the chapter. 5c. Adaptation of themes from the chapter to students' own projects of engaging others in learning or critical thinking about biology in its social context: Suggestions for how to do that— i. Have your audience identify the different kinds of causes and the kinds of actions that would influence those causes (as THINK14 did). Then consider the social position or views of the exponents of different kinds of causes in relation to the different kinds of causes and the kinds of actions that would influence those causes. ii. Brainstorm with instructor