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9781611174908

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A beautifully written, erudite, deeply human story of a flawed hero. Bryan presents Babcock as modest, talented, goodhearted, and dedicated to medicine but ill-equipped to deal with the politics of running an asylum, and overly reticent about his role in the evolving history of pellagra. The reader is quickly absorbed in fights about money, medical science, asylum management, and the fates of the various participants involved. A tour de force. --Rosemary A. Stevens, author of American Medicine and the Public Interest and In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century

Bryan engagingly relates Babcock's successes and failures under strict Jim Crow mandates, producing an enjoyable read that rounds out the multiple works already dealing with pellagra. -- South Carolina Historical Magazine Charles Bryan, physician and accomplished historian of medicine, has written an informative and stimulating book. Weaving together biography and a detective story with an unusual perspective on the Tillman-Blease era of South Carolina history, Asylum Doctor merits the attention of everyone interested in the development of modern medicine as well as in the history of the Palmetto State. --William J. Cooper, Jr., Louisiana State University, author of Jefferson Davis: American and We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861 The extensively researched and documented book is extremely well written and will be of great value for many readers. -- Choice

A thoroughly researched and engagingly written study and a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of mental health care in the South. The chapters dealing with Babcock's important role in the search to understand pellagra are especially notable. After reading them, I felt that I understood the epidemiological history of this terrible nutritional disease for the first time. They also provide an object lesson in how science is sometimes sidetracked by the force of personal, social, and cultural influences. --Peter McCandless, College of Charleston, author of Moonlight, Magnolias, and Madness: Insanity in South Carolina from the Colonial Period to the Progressive Era and Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry

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Charles S. Bryan is the Heyward Gibbes Distinguished Professor of Internal Medicine Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, USA. His extensive publications deal mainly with infectious diseases, medical history, and medical biography. He is a Master of the American College of Physicians and a recipient of the Order of the Palmetto.

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