Thomas Goetz

As the North expanded in a frenzy of industrialization, the South was still overwhelmingly rural.

Poor white Southerners were scorned as unmotivated and slow.

And the stereotype lined up neatly with racial slurs about lazy black people.

And that has been an even more enduring smear.

So Charles Stiles had found his cause.

But what about the cure?

Once the germ for laziness headlines faded, no one seemed that interested in following up on Stiles' work to do anything about the hookworms.

It may have affected 40% of the population, sure, but hookworm was mostly an affliction of the very poor, and often Blacks.

Remember, this was the Jim Crow-era South, not a time of great progress.

So this was just not a priority for the fledgling U.S.

Public Health Service or the growing nation.

So Stiles started stumping and lecturing about what he thought should be done.

He said, my hobby may be summarized in the two words, clean up.

In our filthy American habits of daily life, I see the cause of more preventable sickness and preventable death than I do in any other one factor.

Eventually, in 1908, Stiles hooked up, sorry, with advisors to John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the Standard Oil Company and the richest person in the United States at the time.

Rockefeller was interested in putting his wealth towards philanthropy, and Stiles' work fit the bill.

Soon, there was a Rockefeller Sanitary Commission dedicated to eradicating hookworm in the southern United States.

This would later become the Rockefeller Foundation.

Stiles and the Rockefeller team identified three strategies to fight hookworm.

First, infected people were to be treated with thymol, this was a naturally occurring chemical used as a disinfectant, and Epsom salt to kill and purge the worms.