Pellagra: A plague of Indian maize and Western economics

Pellagra is a rare disease now, but in the early 20th century and before it existed as an epidemic disease. Like many, it had its source in the Columbian exchange. Unlike most such diseases, it was not spread by any microbe. Rather, pellagra is a nutritional deficiency disease, caused by a lack of niacin and nutrients that aid in the production of niacin. It reached epidemic proportions in Italy, the United States, and elsewhere following the spread of corn--minus nutrient-maximizing processing techniques that developed and spread among indigenous Americans and plus agricultural, ecological, and economic circumstances that landed large portions of the population without appropriate nutritional variety.

This blog examines the development and transfer of indigenous knowledge in general and specific practices that prevent pellagra in particular, the adoption of corn but not the practices that made it safe by Western societies, the changes in food production that created epidemic pellagra, and the eventually-successful attempts of Western societies to solve the epidemics through medical science. Economic modernization and ideological biases shaped the course of the epidemics and the form of response in the West.