Vitamins & the Three Ms

When Tom Spies was a rawboned youngster in the cotton, corn and cattle country of northeast Texas' Red River valley, there was enough food (Tom grew to burly quarterback build), but the average farm diet was deadly monotonous. It consisted of the three Ms--meal, meat and molasses, the meal being corn meal and the meat fat back or side meat. A related fact--though no one at the time suspected the connection--was that every year the South had 400,000 new cases of pellagra (Italian for rough skin). The victims' feet and hands (sometimes neck and face) burned with red, scaling patches; their tongues and mouths were so inflamed and sensitive that they could hardly eat; they became lethargic and nervous, often to the point where they were sent off to mental hospitals.

Making the rounds with a doctor uncle, young Tom saw many such cases. The mother of one of his best friends died of pellagra. Tom decided to be a physician.

Last week the A.M.A. gave its Distinguished Service Award (gold medal plus citation) to Dr. Tom Douglas Spies (rhymes with fees), an eccentric bachelor who, at 55, has no home, but lives out of a suitcase in a hotel wherever he happens to be working. About eight months of the year this is Birmingham; for two months it may be Havana or San Juan; the rest of the time it is Chicago, where Spies heads Northwestern University's department of nutrition and metabolism. Since his school days, pellagra has been almost completely banished from the U.S. And, for this gain in health, his boyhood neighbors have nobody to thank more than Tom Spies.

Clue from Animals. As an intern at Cleveland's Lakeside Hospital in 1930, Spies lost his first patient--an alcoholic victim of pellagra. He set about proving that pellagra was the result of a diet deficiency, showed that when victims failed to recover after a good diet had been prescribed, it was because they were so soremouthed that they did not eat their food. When he force-fed them or injected food elements, they got better. Dr. Spies proved, too, that there was no essential difference between the North's "alcoholic pellagra" and the South's "endemic pellagra." He did this first by feeding up Skid Row derelicts at the same time as he allowed them as much corn liquor as they could drink; their pellagra cleared, showing that it had been caused not by alcohol but by the absence of essential food factors. At Birmingham's big Hillman Hospital, Nutritionist Spies worked seemingly miraculous cures by diet alone.

When other researchers showed that nicotinic acid or niacin (one of the B vitamins) was effective against an animal disease resembling pellagra, Dr. Spies seized on the clue, soon proved that simply adding niacin to the diet would go far to cure many cases. (It has since been shown that an amino acid, tryptophane, found in protein foods, is also essential in pellagra prevention.) But Experimenter Spies was convinced that where there was one vitamin deficiency, there were likely to be others. He advocated supplements of several vitamins, was sharply criticized for "shotgun" treatment, has been fully vindicated by later findings.

Magic Through Vitamins. Dr. Spies did much to prove the effectiveness of folic acid, another vitamin, in treating several forms of anemia, including early cases of pernicious anemia. Next, at the University of Havana's Calixto Garcia Hospital, he gave folic acid to victims of tropical sprue, a wasting, debilitating deficiency disease of which anemia is one symptom. Again, patients got better as though by magic. The burden of Spies's current work in Havana and San Juan: to defeat tropical sprue by prevention.

Explaining Tom Spies's lack of a home, an associate says: "Tom has absolutely no pride of ownership. He takes the medals he gets, throws them in a drawer and never looks at them again." Despite his footloose way of life, Dr. Spies keeps a close watch on his patients; when he is away from Birmingham, he phones daily to check on their progress. Patients are devoted to him for another reason. Almost alone in his profession. Dr. Spies is careful never to use a word of more than two syllables if he can help it.

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