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This biography of an early twentieth-century South Carolina doctor sheds light on his pioneering work with the mentally ill to combat a public health scourge. Thousands of Americans died of pellagra before the cause—vitamin B3 deficiency—was identified. Credit for solving the mystery is usually given to Dr. Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service. But in Asylum Doctor, Charles S. Bryan demonstrates that a coalition of American asylum superintendents, local health officials, and practicing physicians set the stage for Golberger’s historic work—chief among them was Dr. James Woods Babcock. As superintendent of the South Carolina State Hospital for the Insane from 1891 to 1914, Babcock sounded the alarm against pellagra. He brough out the first English-language treatise on the subject and organized the National Association for the Study of Pellagra. He did so in the face of troubled asylum governance which, coupled with Governor Cole Blease’s political intimidation and unblushing racism, eventually drove Babcock from his post. Asylum Doctor describes the plight of the mentally ill in South Carolina during an era when public asylums had devolved into convenient places to warehouse inconvenient people. It is the story of an idealistic humanitarian who faced conditions most people would find intolerable. And it is important social history for, as this book’s epigraph puts it, “in many ways the Old South died with the passing of pellagra.”
The geologically ancient Tidewater region of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina rests precariously atop millions of years of erosion from the nearby Appalachian Mountains. An immense wetland at near sea level, it is host to every conceivable body of fresh water, ranging from brooding swamps and large hidden lakes to sluggish blackwater rivers and brackish sounds (one of which was so large an early explorer thought he had found the Pacific Ocean). In this engaging book, biologist and Tidewater native Roy T. Sawyer delivers an ecohistory of this unique waterland whose wind-driven tides cover a rich human and natural past. Jutting prominently into the Atlantic, this wetland is the final stop for the warmth of the Gulf Stream before it is deflected from the American mainland. At the top of a narrow, warm coastal strip, it provides an ideal home for a vast array of animal and plant life, including prodigious numbers of reptiles (such as the world’s northernmost population of alligators) and overwintering waterfowl. It is also home to the oldest known living trees east of the Rocky Mountains. The climate and geography made the area a natural choice for very early human habitation--as far back as the last ice age, when the region was a rich oasis just south of a veritable tundra. In examining the impact of humans upon this environment, and vice-versa, Sawyer reveals how our alarming shortsightedness has produced a fragile and endangered present. Although human manipulation started here as early as ten thousand years ago (coinciding with extinction of mammoths and other megafauna), the environment has been altered most radically over only the last one hundred years, particularly in regard to land drainage, deforestation, overfishing, and pollution. The author provides an authoritative overview of the human impact on these wetlands and suggests ways in which we might still salvage them. In so doing, he explores the effects of hurricanes, droughts, forest fires, and ice ages of the past--and anticipates, in this age of global warming, natural events that may be still to come.
