“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. Established in 1914 with a special congressional appropriation to the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) and set up primarily for research, the hospital was the result of mutually reinforcing factors. One was pellagra's growing threat: 1,306 reported pellagra deaths in South Carolina during the first ten months of 1915; 100,000 southerners infected in 1916. Another was the need of the PHS for a clinic to conduct metabolic studies on pellagra to establish its probable dietary origin. By the time the facility closed down in 1921, the Spartanburg Pellagra Hospital had helped scientists prove the dietary basis of pellagra and enabled hundreds of South Carolinians to rid themselves of a life-threatening disease.