Background

Paul Henry De Kruif was born on March 2, 1890 in Zeeland, Michigan; he was of Dutch descent. His parents were Hendrik de Kruif and Hendrika J. Kremer.  The father, a self-made man, ran a prosperous farm implements business, but he was determined his son would make something greater of himself and escape small-town life.

Education

De Kruif entered the University of Michigan in 1907, as his father directed, to study a profession, either law, medicine, or engineering.  In his sophomore year de Kruif settled on medicine after reading an article about Doctor Paul Ehrlich, the Germanscientist.  

After earning his Bachelor of Science degree in 1912, however, he decided that he preferred research to practicing medicine and graduate school to medical school.  

A Rockefeller research fellowship enabled him to study bacteriology under Professor Frederick G. Novy, a pioneer in the field, at the University of Michigan.  De Kruif's dissertation demonstrated that healthy rat serum quickly and easily became toxic under certain conditions.  He earned his doctorate in 1916.

Career

After earning his doctorate De Kruif was immediately hired by the University of Michigan as an assistant professor of bacteriology.  His teaching career was interrupted by World War I, though; in 1917 he entered the U. S. Army Sanitary Corps, where he became part of a research team that discovered the antitoxin for gangrene resulting from poison gas.  His work earned him a promotion from lieutenant to captain.  At war's end de Kruif returned to the University of Michigan where he taught in both the medical school and the college.  

A scientific paper he presented in 1918 at the Society for Experimental Biology in Cincinnati, Ohio, resulted in a job offer two years later in the greener pastures of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (Rockefeller University) in New York City.  A letter de Kruif had written to H. L. Mencken, an author he much admired, led to advice that launched him on a new and profitable career, scientific writing.  Mencken introduced de Kruif into the New York literary scene, and soon de Kruif had his first commission.  

The key year in de Kruif's transformation was 1922, his first published piece of writing appeared, an essay on the state of American medicine in Harold Stearn's Civilization in the United States (1922).  He earned fifty dollars for the assignment.  Initially de Kruif expected to write in his spare time, but a series of articles he published on the medical profession for Century magazine forced him to write full-time: some of the unflattering portraits included in the articles resembled his colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute quite closely, and de Kruif was compelled to resign.  

Another series of investigative articles on the medical profession led de Kruif to Sinclair Lewis, and the two began to collaborate on what would become Arrowsmith (1925).  Although their relations were stormy Lewis nevertheless acknowledged de Kruif's assistance, and de Kruif earned 25 percent of the book's profits. Arrowsmith was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1926, which Lewis turned down without consulting his collaborator.  Afterward de Kruif used to say that he got "one quarter" of a Pulitzer but turned it down.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, de Kruif wrote several books - Hunger Fighters (1928), Seven Iron Men (1929), and Men Against Death (1932) - and, with playwright Sidney Howard, Yellow Jacket (1934), which was made into a motion picture in 1938.  

A letter de Kruif received from the poet Ezra Pound in 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, sharpened his social conscience and helped turn his efforts in a more overtly political direction.  Pound asked him if he had thought about the impact of poverty on health. The result was Why Keep Them Alive? (1936), written with his wife Rhea, an expose of the effects of poverty on children, which made a plea for a more equitable distribution of wealth. The book was not well received, especially by the medical community.  

A work more flattering to the profession, The Fight for Life (1938), was more popular; it was adapted by Pare Lorentz as a documentary film.  In 1939, de Kruif met with President Franklin Roosevelt to discuss public health issues.  As a result, Roosevelt appointed him to several committees charged with investigating public health concerns, particularly polio, which had disabled the president more than a decade before.  Health Is Wealth (1940) argued that expanded public health facilities offering preventive medical care might improve America's health.  Like his 1936 study, it angered medical professionals with its critical portrayal of doctors.  

Over the 1930s, de Kruif returned to his first love, bacteriological research, to help develop a pre-penicillin treatment for syphilis.  In the 1940s and 1950s, de Kruif wrote some two hundred articles, primarily for Reader's Digest and other magazines in the Curtis Publishing Company empire.  He also continued to write books on scientific and medical topics: Kaiser Wakes the Doctors (1943), Male Hormone (1945), Life Among the Doctors (1949), and A Man Against Insanity (1957).

De Kruif never lost his commitments to preventive medicine and a strong public health movement to help those living in poverty.  

He died in his native town just four days shy of his eighty-first birthday.

Achievements

• Paul Henry De Kruif was a noted scientist whose most famous work was Microbe Hunters, a study of early microbiologists which sold over a million copies and was translated into eighteen languages.  

Works

More photos

• book

  • The male hormone,

    (In this thrilling scientific detective story Paul de Krui...)

  • Microbe Hunters

    ( This science classic by Paul de Kruif chronicles the pi...)

  • Life among the Doctors

    (How our doctors are combining new scientific miracles wit...)

  • Kaiser wakes the doctors

    (The story of Henry j. Kaiser's medical plan. "How the bes...)

  • The fight for life,

    (THE FIGHT FOR LIFE)

  • Hunger fighters

    (.)

  • Health is Wealth
  • Men against death
  • Why keep them alive?

Views

No matter where De Kruif lived in pursuit of a story, he always considered Holland, Michigan, his home.

Interests

• De Kruif traveled a great deal and enjoyed exercising - jogging in his younger days and walking as he got older.  

Connections

De Kruif was married and had two sons.  His wife, Mary, was also a professor, but de Kruif said little about her in interviews or in his memoirs, perhaps because of subsequent events.  

After only a few years of marriage, he fell in love with a laboratory assistant,  Rhea Elizabeth Barbarin.  Torn by conflicting feelings - love for Rhea, responsibility for his children, and guilt toward his wife - he decided the best solution was to augment his salary so that he could afford a divorce and remarriage. He married Rhea on December 11, 1922.

The death of his second wife in 1957 slowed de Kruif's prolific efforts.  

He was married for a third time, to Eleanor Lappage, in September 1959, and published his memoirs, The Sweeping Wind, in 1962, but his work on scientific subjects flagged.

Father:

Hendrik De Kruif

Mother:

Hendrika J. (Kremer) De Kruif

Spouse:

Eleanor (Lappage) De Kruif

Spouse:

Rhea Elizabeth (Barbarin) De Kruif

Spouse:

Mary De Kruif

colleague:

Sinclair Lewis

References

• Microbe Hunters - Then and Now
• Seven Iron Men: The Merritts and the Discovery of the Mesabi Range (Fesler-Lampert Minnesota Heritage)