Join the Center for Science, Technology, and Society and the Center for Biomedical Research for a seminar featuring Dr. Sara Naramore, assistant professor of history at Missouri State University. The talk is titled "Missing the Magic Bullet: The complicated road to treating iodine deficiency."

Seminar Abstract
In 1800 American physician and naturalist Benjamin Smith Barton wrote the first book-length treatise on endemic goiter in the United States. Eleven years later French chemist Bernard Courtois discovered a new element: iodine. The element quickly entered the pharmacopoeia as a new chemical anti-inflammatory drug, in part due to its success curing goiter. All the puzzle pieces were on the table to understand goiter as a deficiency disease. Why did it take another century for doctors to put the pieces together?

We like to think of discovery as the catalyst for change in science, but change is often slower than we expect. Over the century and a half after Barton published, Americans from the Great Lakes to Pacific Northwest struggled with swollen thyroids caused by insufficient dietary iodine. However, when learning about their predicament they faced a wide array of theories regarding its cause ranging from genetics to infections to miasma. Geography remained the keyway doctors predicted the likelihood of goiter developing in a population while they plied patients with iodide compounds and liquified thyroid extracts. A misunderstanding of disease causation extended the era of goiter for an untold number of patients until nutritional science and public health institutions underwent
significant change in the early twentieth century. This talk will use goiter as a way of exploring the connections and miscommunications between medicine and public health as well as the challenge of determining disease causation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.