Really enjoyed this book, despite the bulky young adult format.
Nice medical mystery. Author introduces some victims, builds up your sympathies, relates some horrible deaths then brings on the medical detectives. Studies are presented in interesting fashion and everything neatly summarized at the end ( )

In Red Madness, Jarrow describes a devastating illness and the work to solve the puzzle in a time when biology was observational with little known of the bio-chemistry involved in life. A disease of poverty, for the most part, Pellagra was devastating and in the hardest hit states of the U.S. was among the top causes of death from disease. Dr. Joseph Goldberg spent over fifteen years of his professional career solving the puzzle of Pellagra. He and his colleagues discovered and proved Pellagra to be caused by a nutritional deficit. The exact vitamin process was found later in laboratory studies, and is what we now call Niacin (B-12), an additive to most grain products since the 1950's. Now I understand why my bread is fortified! The book is easy to read and uses Dr. Goldberg as a central character in the work, while crediting the many individuals who contributed to the puzzle's solution. Throughout the text, images and historical accounts of people with this devastating illness, are used to add real life accounts to an issue that otherwise may seem removed from day-to-day concerns. The book is well referenced using primary documentation and historical accounts. An index, glossary and extensive notations at the end of the book provide further knowledge without detracting from the design of Red Madness. A must have for collections of juvenile non-fiction to help the future understand why we have niacin additives and why nutrition is important. The book is a key in understanding diet and health for young people and people of any age. ( )

I don't read a lot of nonfiction anymore, but this was quite interesting. We are so used to our food being enriched with vitamins and minerals, that I doubt we even notice it on the labels. Red Madness explains with news accounts, pictures, and good research why our food is the way it is today. ( )

This is a fascinating story. I love reading about mysterious diseases and how scientists use experiments to figure things out. The cause of pellagra had been a mystery for so many years, because there was some knowledge that we just needed to have before it could be figured out. Like, for example, preventing the deaths of surgery patients from infection by washing your hands - that couldn't have been figured out before germ theory. It's so easy to stick with what you know instead of changing your paradigm, and a lot of people thought that pellagra must be an infectious disease, even though it didn't really seem to be contagious. It required someone who knew that nutrient deficiency could cause disease, and who could put together the right experiments to test their theories. I love reading about doctors and scientists who experiment on themselves and this story includes a lot of people eating pus and feces in order to prove that pellagra wasn't infectious. I was also really fascinated by how politics can have such a large effect on something that should be based on facts. Pellagra was proven to be caused by a nutrient deficiency, but that truth was bad for the reputation of the southern states. They had more cases of pellagra, and didn't appreciate being accused of being poorer or of not being able to feed their people as well as the north. I'm sure the north was being kind of condescending about it too. So there were people ignoring the truth, and allowing more people to die, because they thought the reality would make them look bad.

While the information was really interesting, the book kind of dragged. I felt like it could have been a lot shorter - also the little paragraphs on almost every page about some new pellagra victim who died of the disease or killed themselves or who had very sad families...I think it was supposed to humanize the victims but to me it ended up doing the opposite. If the author had followed maybe 2 or 3 people I would have been more interested...but all the stories were so similar that I just stopped reading them.

Medicine is weird. Imagine the books like this written in 100 years about all the people who died in the 21st century from things that they'll be able to prevent with a single pill.
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At the turn of the 20th century, tens of thousands of Americans developed a mysterious illness with symptoms ranging from disfigurement to insanity to death. Jarrow traces the unraveling of a terrifying medical mystery as she details how doctors, scientists, and public health officials determined the cause of the illness, commonly known as pellagra, against a backdrop of culture, politics, and Progressivism. Illustrated with 100 archival photographs, Jarrow has also included vignettes of real life pellagra victims and accounts of the scientific investigations. It concludes with a glossary, timeline, further resources, author’s note, bibliography, and index. ( )