Conclusion

From the processing and exchange of corn in the New World to widespread disease and misattribution in Europe, we have seen pellagra develop. Though one of the less-told stories of the Columbian Exchange, the presence of and reactions to pellagra can tell much about societies at the time. While Native American societies tended view disease as a punishment earned by mistreatment of the environment, and therefore respected the environment and their own time-tested ways of dealing with it, the Europeans took a more removed view. Even knowing the dietary cause of pellagra, they looked to socioeconomic and medical causes rather than the relationship between humans and environment - food production being a central part of that. This removal from not only the environment but from the processing of the corn itself (as many bought cornmeal ready-made and did not know that preparing it properly could help prevent malnutrition) made it difficult for the Europeans to understand pellagra or put an end to its effects. In contrast, the Native Americans - though they did suffer from malnutrition, in some cases - were able to sustain a diet based in large part on maize for thousands of years by paying close attention to the processing of corn and their interactions with the environment around them. With this in mind, one of the lessons of the pellagra epidemic might be to pay attention to the contexts of exchanged goods and disease - not only social context, but environmental context as well.