Case Study

The 1920”s was a time of great hardship in many places in the United States and elsewhere. At that time a plaque of unknown cause was sweeping the south. Epidemiologists were frantically working to find the cause. New discoveries in the field of virology and bacteriology lead many to look for a germ as the cause. The following individuals lived and that period, each tells a little about him or her.

Elijah White

Race: Black

Age: Fifteen

It ain’t nothing new having the diarrhea all the time, most everybody in my family has the runs. Least I don’t look all scabby like by mama. My sister’s in worse shape than me, too, she’s all skinny and has sores on her arms and legs. Grandpa died last week. He didn’t even know who we was at the end. He hardly ate anything in the weeks before he died; his mouth was so full of sores. I guess the real thing that bothers me is being hungry all the time. Mama and me, we work in the fields all day, trying to get a good cotton crop, but it ain’t worth nothing anyways. Most nights all we eat is cornbread, molasses, and some pork fat. I dry to grind the corn for mama so she don’t have to. I hope the corn we got saved don’t give out before the next harvest.

Joseph Goldberger II

Race: White

Age: Sixteen

My father works for the U.S. Public health Service. He spends most of his time out at the prison. He says things are going to get a lot worse for poor people around here. He told mother that he told the president that as many as 100,000 people may die next year if someone doesn’t do something. He works on a disease that is terrible, people get scaly sores on their skin, they get the diarrhea, too, and some people go crazy. Nobody really seems to care too much if he figures out why these poor people die from it or not. People here in the south don’t really care too much about the blacks or the poor white trash. My mom understands that he is a scientist, but she wasn’t happy when dad injected himself with blood from one of the “pellagrans”. It’s pretty disgusting, but he even has gone so far as to eat the scabs off people’s sores. He didn’t get sick though. He says the disease has to due with diet and that’s what he’s doing out at the prison. He worked it out with the governor that inmates that work with him on his study will get a pardon. He says his research will prove beyond a doubt that poor diet causes the disease.

Elizabeth Bird Woman

Race: Native American

Age: Fifteen

I live on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Most people think we don’t live too good. Most white people don’t think too much of us at all. We do okay. I live with my great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, father, and three brothers. We have our own allotment of land and have a big garden in the bottom lands. It is a lot of work, but we grow enough for food for our family and some extra for relatives. We plant, harvest and store in the way my Great-grandmother learned as a girl.

Buffalo Bird Woman, a Hidatsa Indian born around 1839, was an expert gardener. Following centuries-old methods, she and the women of her family raised huge crops of corn, squash, beans, and sunflowers on the rich bottomlands of the Missouri River in what is now North Dakota. When she was young, her fields were near Like-a fishhook, the earth-lodge village that the Hidatsa shared with the Mandan and Arikara. When she grew older, the families of the three tribes moved to individual allotments on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, and the women continued to grow food in the bottomlands.