Background
Joseph James Kinyoun was born November 25, 1860 in East Bend, North Carolina, the oldest of five children born to Elizabeth Ann Conrad and John Hendricks Kinyoun.
Joseph James Kinyoun was born November 25, 1860 in East Bend, North Carolina, the oldest of five children born to Elizabeth Ann Conrad and John Hendricks Kinyoun.
Kinyoun was educated at Saint Louis Medical College and graduated from Bellevue Medical College in 1882. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy from Georgetown University in 1896.
The family moved to Johnson County, Missouri, in 1866, where the elder Kinyoun was a physician. He did postdoctoral studies in pathology and bacteriology at the Carnegie Laboratory and in Europe under Robert Koch. Doctor Kinyoun began his career in the Marine Hospital Service as an assistant surgeon, taking over direction of the Laboratory of Hygiene in 1887.
When the Surgeon General moved the laboratory from Staten Island to Washington, District of Columbia in 1891, Kinyoun moved as well.
In 1899, he became head of the Marine Hospital Service in San Francisco. In March 1900 he was central to the discovery of the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904.
He resigned his position in 1901 after allegations that his conclusive bubonic plague diagnoses were scaremongering. He was proven correct by independent testing and the appearance of further cases.
Kinyoun"s later career was spent in private companies and as a professor of bacteriology and pathology at George Washington University before becoming a bacteriologist for the District of Columbia Health Department, a position he held until his death.
In 1909, Doctor Kinyoun served as president of the American Society for Microbiology. He is perhaps best known now for the dissemination of the Kinyoun modification of the Ziehl-Neelsen stain for Acid-fast bacteria. Death and afterward Joseph Kinyoun died on February 14, 1919, in Washington, District of Columbia. A collection of his papers is held at the National Library of Medicine.