Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

60. THE CITY OF PELLAGRA - some history of a long-doomed subject:

During WWII, a Nazi program to euthanize children deemed unworthy of living was carried out in hospital buildings called 'hungerhauser', where a diet of potatoes, turnips and cabbage was designed to cause death in 3 months - learning exactly what happens when people starve was crucial in the progress of nutritional science because it focuses on sickness caused not by pathogens but by what was missing from the diet and - since Galen - disease had been blamed on something bad invading the body and putting it out of balance but the paradigm shift occurred after it became abundantly clear that the lack of essential nutrients could also be at fault - even well into the 19th century when it was already known that citrus fruits and vegetables prevented scurvy conventional wisdom asserted they were effective because they contained an antidote to bad air and unwholesome food not that they contained somehow an essential nutrient for health and nowhere was this stubborn reluctance to such an idea more apparent than in the insufferable slow recognition of what caused pellagra - known as a disease of squalor and poverty - it was widespread during and after the Civil War in the southern United States where the mortality rate among those suffering was 40 percent - some blamed insect bites others were convinced it was a contagious disease brought into the country by Italian immigrants and when an epidiologist named Joseph Goldberger went south in 1915 and noted that in asylums holding pellagra sufferers none of the staff members were affected he concluded that it could not be infectious - on the other hand the employees ate well while inmates were fed fatback and cornbread and to see if inadequate nutrition was the culprit Goldberger served balanced meals to children in two orphanages where after only a few weeks pellagra disappeared and the logical conclusion that pellagra resulted from a deficient diet (specifically lack of nicatinic acid) was obscured by the prevalence of eugenics whose proponents contended that the institutions where Goldberger conducted his studies held inferior people who were especially susceptible to disease - NOW if it's something of a Kafkaesque notion to live in a hunger house then that's the notion I'll share spiritually and internally for like some fevered Hunger Artist of that time and those stories I too have proclivities for starvation and withering and no disease 'cept living can be blamed for that and the sunshine blue skies forever-river of love won't stop at my door and ONE THINKS why stop at children let's seek adults too lets bring forth the whiter shade of pale-fire necessary for death itself to come calling we ALL have the EACH disease and we die before our time all other appointments notwithstanding and in this curious city I found myself I stood before either DOORS that would not open or DOORS which - already opened - led nowhere and that was a form of stasis a freeze and a paralysis I lived with and no matter what I ate nothing solved the problem - corn muffins potato bread knishes oatmeal eggs milk meat rice beans and cabbage too - and I saw investigators (the loopy kind the starchy kind the crazed) 'injecting themselves with blood from severely affected victims and rubbing secretions from the mucous sores into their nose and mouth and after three days swallowing pellets consisting of the urine feces and skin scabs from several diseased subjects and NONE contracted pellagra' and no matter because still nothing was 'done' to improve the diets of the poor until finally in the 1930's pellagra began to disappear (and here's where the Grapes of Wrath type SOCIALIST intent comes in - so first 'one' government tries to contract the disease and then 'another' government combats it) thanks in part to federal soup kitchens and the introduction of enriched flour : I can't allow myself to believe such drivel cannot abide the intent and if the unholy combination let's say of such as Golberger and the Government - if they MUST come together - then I'd rather have it over my own dead body! - for I need no investigators nor testers to tell me what I was living and their own blindness sloth envy and scientific nonsense would bring I knew nothing but dread and fear - which is ANOTHER kind of disease altogether is it not? - and barring that we bar nothing but bar the door and head for the exits and the midnight toasts of both Devil and Kin are nothing more than flames over dead bodies piled high and the soft squeal of delight is the true brigand of cruelty so HUNGER HOUSE today - if it might be anything at all - is a restaurant to be sure.