The Pellagra Portraits.

Dr Joseph Goldberger (1874-1929), a US Public Health Service officer, spent much of his later career investigating the etiology of pellagra and its treatment. Goldberger believed that physicians needed additional training to recognize subtle erythema and other clinical manifestations of pellagra, so in 1919 he commissioned color illustrations because black-and-white photographs of pellagra lesions provided “less than satisfactory results” in identifying dermal plaques. The result was a collection of 41 detailed illustrations of patients with pellagra, all drawn by portrait artist John Wesley Carroll (1892-1959) in 1919. Carroll’s illustrations illustrated pellagra dermatitis of the face and neck, including Casal necklace, and also brought the dignity of portraiture to the patients he depicted. They are held us part of the Goldberger-Sebrell Collection at Eskind Biomedical Library, Vanderbilt University. At a time when some physicians still believed pellagra was infectious, Carroll spent hundreds of hours in close proximity with 41 patients—an act of care and empathy among those marginalized by poverty, racism, and disease. Carroll’s use of portraiture, a practice typically reserved for the social elite, signaled then and now the power of art to help combat disease stigma. This Arts and Medicine feature reviews the history of pellagra and recovers the role of artist and illustrator John Carroll who, in 1919, painted portraits of people with the vitamin deficiency to document in color the appearance of pellagra skin plaques.