The original building of the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum is now the Robert Mills Building, 2100 Bull Street. The Department of Health and Environmental Control have offices located in the Robert Mills Building, a Classical Revival style structure and one of the City’s most important landmarks. The building was designed by architect Robert Mills and built in 1823.
Dr. Charles S. Bryan says he spent 15 years working on the parallel history of the life and career of Dr. James Woods Babcock, the superintendent of the South Carolina State Hospital (1891–1914) and of the history of the development, spread, and study of the disease pellagra. Pallagra is a condition caused by malnutrition that developed in much of the American population as the industrial revolution changed the way that cornmeal and other foods were processed. This caused a loss of nutrients in the daily diets of large groups of people in a way that mimicked an infectious disease.
Babcock, in his first years as director of the South Carolina Asylum, had dealt with tuberculosis, a highly infectious disease that repeatedly spread within the population at the asylum and could not be eradicated. When the first patients at the South Carolina Asylum showed the signs of pellagra, Babcock took a great interest in the problem and became known internationally as the leader in the study of pellagra, a condition that is rare today.
Dr. Babcock founded the National Association for the Study of Pellagra and hosted four international conferences in Columbia on the grounds of the Columbia asylum, bringing in doctors and pellagra researchers to this city from across the nation and around the world. Bryan says these conferences in 1908, 1909, 1912, and 1915 were the first of this historical significance and notoriety in Columbia.
Bryan’s work, Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellagra , tells the story of an asylum superintendent working for quality treatment of those afflicted with mental illness and other conditions “during an era when public asylums had developed into convenient places to warehouse inconvenient people.”
Babcock is described as an honest, reliable administrator with a humanitarian spirit toward others that was ahead of his time. Bryan writes that Babcock was generous with his resources and helped the greater Columbia community through projects such as the development of the city waterworks system and his research on pellagra.
In his concluding chapter, Bryan writes:
James Woods Babcock was among the last of a breed, the “old asylum doctor.” It is hard for us to imagine the sights, sounds, and hallucinations, the stench arising from some of the wards. Most of the inmates have been replaced by the successfully treated, the partially treated, and, all too often, by the homeless…. Gone are the old asylums, the monotonous “3-M” diets, the brewer’s yeast tablets on dining tables, the connotations of place names like “Bull Street,” a local equivalent of “Bedlam.” But we can be reasonably be certain that the poor, the undernourished, the medically underserved, and the mentally ill will always be with us, or at least for the foreseeable future.
Charles S. Bryan MD was born in Columbia and graduated from Dreher High School in 1960. Bryan pursued the study of medicine, attending Harvard College for two years before completing his BA from The Johns Hopkins University in 1964 and earning his MD from The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1967.
Bryan’s specialization is in epidemiology or the study of infectious diseases. Bryan currently serves as the director of Internal and Family Medicine with Providence Hospital after a 30 year career as a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine.
During his years at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Bryan served as director of the Midlands Care Consortium ( for patients with HIV/AIDS); director, Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities; and assistant dean for Medical Humanities at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. Bryan served as the Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Heyward Gibbes Distinguished Professor of Internal Medicine Emeritus.
Bryan is also a prolific writer, both academic and in the fields of philosophy, medical history and medical biography. Bryan has spent much time in research and writing medical biographiestelling the stories of the lives and careers of influential medical professionals. Bryan has researched and published several works about the life of Dr. Theodore Brevard Hayne, whom he calls the most influential physician in history for his research on yellow fever ( A Most Satisfactory Man: The Story of Theodore Brevard Hayne, Last Mar tyr of Yel low Fever. 1996) and Sir William Oscar, a famous English physician, (Osler: Inspirations from a Great Physician 1997, Saints of Humani ty: Selections from Sir William Osler’s Recommended Bedside Library 2002, and The Quotable Osler 2003.)
Bryan’s book Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellegra was released by The University of South Carolina Press in 2014. A booksigning for Charles S. Bryan’s Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellagra is scheduled on October 14, 2014 at 5:30 p.m.- 6 p.m. at the Veterans Administration Hospital School of Medicine Library. The public is invited to attend.
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