Background
He was born on August 11, 1856, in Chester, the son of Dr. Sidney Babcock and Margaret (Woods) Babcock. His father was a surgeon in the Confederate army and a practitioner of medicine in Chester before and after the Civil War.
(Excerpt from Prevalence of Pellagra, 1911: Article Reprin...)
Excerpt from Prevalence of Pellagra, 1911: Article Reprinted From the Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association Pe agra does not always result in mental disturbances. Probabl less than 10 per cent of pellagra patients have their minds affected; and there are many peasants who have the disease for 15 or 20 years. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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He was born on August 11, 1856, in Chester, the son of Dr. Sidney Babcock and Margaret (Woods) Babcock. His father was a surgeon in the Confederate army and a practitioner of medicine in Chester before and after the Civil War.
Babcock was educated at Phillips Academy, Exeter, and Harvard College, where he was graduated in 1882. Four years later he received his M. D. degree from the Harvard Medical School.
After his graduation he was appointed assistant physician to the McLean Hospital, then located in Somerville, Massachussets, where he remained from 1887 to 1891. In the latter year he accepted the superintendency of the State Lunatic Asylum, Columbia, a position which he held until 1914.
He was professor of mental diseases at the South Carolina Medical College from 1915 until his death. During his residence in the South Carolina State Hospital for the Insane, as it was later called, Babcock did most of his important work. He not only made his institution one of the best in the country, but also investigated or stimulated investigation in many important problems of psychiatry and of the care of the insane. In 1894, in a timely paper, he called attention to the prevalence of tuberculosis in hospitals for the insane and outlined a sound scheme for prevention of this disease (American Journal of Insanity, 1894-95, LI, 182). The next year he made a plea, which had far-reaching effects, for the better care of the colored insane (Alienist and Neurologist, 1895, XVI, 423).
In 1910, he collaborated with Dr. C. H. Lavinder in a translation into English of Dr. A. Marie's La Pellagre, a book which was used extensively in this country and, combined with Lavinder's later reports for the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, served to establish the disease here as a clinical entity. Babcock founded the National Association for the Study of Pellagra and through this organization vigorously conducted a fight against this malady, especially in the southern states.
His most important work, however, was with pellagra. Patients with pellagra were observed at his hospital in 1907, and the next year Babcock and others presented to the South Carolina State Board of Health a report on nine cases and a careful review of the literature of the subject, the first comprehensive account of the disease to be published in this country (Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association, 1908, IV, 64).
(Excerpt from Prevalence of Pellagra, 1911: Article Reprin...)
In 1892 he married Katharine Guion of Lincolnton, a graduate of the Massachusetts General Hospital Training School for Nurses, by whom he had three daughters.
