Joseph B. Goldberger

1874-1929 The Pellagra Detective

The Microbe Hunter.

Joseph Goldberger was a Hungarian who immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of seven. They lived in the East Side of Manhattan and ran a grocery store where Joseph worked as a delivery boy. A bright student, he entered the City College of New York at age sixteen. Goldberger first planned to become a civil engineer, but two years after he dropped in on a lecture at Bellevue Hospital Medical College, he changed his mind and decided to become a doctor. After graduating from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1895, he had a private practice until he joined the United States Public Health Service in 1899. For the next fourteen years he was a microbe hunter, fighting yellow fever, dengue fever, typhus, and typhoid in the United States and Mexico. His most important...