Background
John Friend Mahoney was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and was the son of David Mahoney, a locomotive engineer, and Mary Ann Hogan.
John Friend Mahoney was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and was the son of David Mahoney, a locomotive engineer, and Mary Ann Hogan.
After graduating from high school in Fond du Lac in 1908, Mahoney worked for one year as a truck farmer before undertaking studies at Milwaukee University and Marquette Medical College.
He received the M. D. in 1914 and began two years of intern training, first at the Milwaukee County Hospital and later at the Chicago Lying-in Hospital.
Mahoney's professional career was divided into two phases. The first consisted of thirty-two years as a commissioned officer of the U. S. Public Health Service. Mahoney was commissioned in September 1917 and, after various assignments characteristic of a junior officer, was detailed to the U. S. Foreign Service in 1925.
During the ensuing four years, he served as public health adviser in Haiti, Ireland, England, and Germany.
While serving abroad, Mahoney exploited the opportunity to observe the management of sexually transmitted diseases in foreign clinics and the laboratory methods used in their diagnosis. This experience enhanced his interest and skill in dealing with venereal diseases, which were a very important problem for Public Health Service medical officers, most of whose patients were seafaring men exposed to the diseases in port cities throughout the world.
At that time, there was no effective treatment for gonorrhea and the treatment for syphilis consisted of injections of toxic drugs administered weekly over periods of months to years.
In July 1929, Mahoney was appointed a director of the Venereal Disease Research Laboratory located at the Marine Hospital at Stapleton, Staten Island, New York. During the next twenty years, he was associated there with a series of young investigators working on both laboratory and clinical problems.
Mahoney's scientific publications, frequently written with one or more associates, mark the progress of technology as applied to the diagnosis and treatment of venereal infections. His early work was devoted to experimental infection of rabbits with the corkscrew-shaped syphilis organism, using the dark-field microscope, which enables one to see the unstained living organism.
Knowledge of the mechanism and rate of penetration into tissues by the germ became the basis for more rational procedures for prophylaxis against infection. Later he turned to studies of the serologic tests for syphilis, the blood tests that for many years have been the principal aid to diagnosis after the earliest stage of the disease has passed.
Although now invaluable, these tests had many deficiencies in Mahoney's time: the reagents were crude, the techniques were not standardized, the test results were inconsistent, and there was an undesirable incidence of both false positive and false negative reactions.
When Surgeon General Thomas Parran made the control of venereal diseases a major concern of the Public Health Service during his tenure from 1936 to 1948, Mahoney's laboratory played the key federal role in improving diagnostic methods.
Because serologic testing was being done on a massive scale by state and local governmental laboratories, much importance was attached to minimizing the test deficiencies. Interstate evaluation surveys were conducted and information about sources of error was disseminated, which resulted in improved reagents and standardized methods.
During this period he published several papers dealing with the efficacy of sulfonamide drugs in the treatment of gonorrhea. When penicillin first became available during World War II, it was in very short supply and subject to allocation. After meeting the military needs for treatment of wound infections there was little available for the study of novel uses.
Mahoney obtained enough to demonstrate in rabbits that the drug might kill the spirochete of syphilis. This led to the allocation of a supply of penicillin to continue the rabbit studies concurrently with clinical trials in four patients with early syphilis. The success of this experiment, reported in December 1943, led to a large clinical trial by collaborating investigators that confirmed the value of the drug and quickly made it the standard treatment.
Mahoney is probably most widely known for this role in revolutionizing the treatment of syphilis. In succeeding years he contributed knowledge derived from long-term follow-up of treated patients. In particular, he studied the changes in serological reactions after treatment and continued to improve reagents and test methods.
In December 1949, he retired from the Public Health Service and began the second phase of his career, as director of the Bureau of Laboratories in the New York City Health Department. Four days later, Mayor William O'Dwyer appointed him to the post of health commissioner, in which he served until 1953. Under his leadership, the department initiated a number of important programs.
Among these were a campaign to prevent lead poisoning in children, the introduction of isoniazid chemotherapy in tuberculosis clinics, and the recommendation that New York City's water be fluoridated. Upon appointment of a new commissioner in 1954, he resumed the direction of the Bureau of Laboratories, where he served until his death. Mahoney held appointments in clinical syphilology at New York University School of Medicine and in dermatology at Columbia University School of Medicine.
He served as chairman of the committee of experts on a venereal disease of the World Health Organization, of the National Serology Advisory Council, and of the Committee on Standardization of Serological Tests for Syphilis of the American Public Health Association.
He died on February 23, 1957, in Staten Island, New York.
Mahoney was a member of the Syphilis Study Section of the National Institutes of Health and of the Committee on Research and Standards of the American Public Health Association.
Mahoney married Leah Ruth Arnold on September 29, 1926; they had two children.