During the early twentieth century thousands of Americans died of pellagra before the cause - vitamin B3 deficiency - was identified.   Leading the American response to pellagra was Dr. James Woods Babcock (1856–1922), superintendent of the South Carolina State Hospital for the Insane from 1891 to 1914. It was largely Babcock who sounded the alarm, brought out the first English-language treatise on pellagra, and organized the National Association for the Study of Pellagra. The book also includes a history of mental health administration in South Carolina during the early twentieth century and reveals the complicated, troubled governance of the asylum. Asylum Doctor describes the plight of the mentally ill during an era when public asylums had devolved into convenient places to warehouse inconvenient people. It is the story of an idealistic humanitarian who faced conditions most people would find intolerable. And it is important social history for, as this book’s epigraph puts it, 'in many ways the Old South died with the passing of pellagra.”  “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 “A thoroughly researched and engagingly written study and a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of mental health care in the South. … an object lesson in how science is sometimes sidetracked by the force of personal, social, and cultural influences.” - Peter McCandless, College of Charleston