Joseph James Kinyoun (November 25, 1860 – February 14, 1919) was an American physician and the founder of the United States' Hygienic Laboratory, the predecessor of the National Institutes of Health.
His career was nearly ended by his insistence, while serving as head of the Marine Hospital Service in San Francisco, on taking vigorous measures to contain the spread of the bubonic plague. He resigned his position in 1901 after being attacked for his diagnoses, including claims by California Governor Henry Gage that he and other federal employees had falsified evidence by injecting cadavers with bacilli. He was ultimately proven correct by independent testing and the appearance of further cases.
Kinyoun's later career was spent in private companies and as a professor of bacteriology and pathology at George Washington University before becoming a bacteriologist for the District of Columbia Health Department, a position he held until his death. In 1909, Kinyoun served as president of the American Society for Microbiology. In 1915, he developed the Kinyoun stain, a procedure used to stain acid-fast bacteria.
Biography
Early life
Joseph James "Joe" Kinyoun was born November 25, 1860, in East Bend, North Carolina, the oldest of five children born to Elizabeth Ann Conrad and John Hendricks Kinyoun. His family settled in Post Oak, Missouri in 1866 after his house burned down during the Civil War. At the age of 16, he studied medicine with his father, John Hendricks Kinyoun, who was a general practitioner. His family joined a Baptist church.
Kinyoun was educated at St. Louis Medical College and graduated from Bellevue Medical College in 1882 with an M.D. degree. He did postdoctoral studies in pathology and bacteriology at the Carnegie Laboratory, where he became the first bacteriology student and studied cholera. Then he was a visiting scientist in Europe under Robert Koch. He was awarded a Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1896.
Career
Hygienic Laboratory (1887–1896) On October 4, 1886, Kinyoun began his career in the Marine Hospital Service at Staten Island Quarantine Station as an assistant surgeon, taking over the direction of the Laboratory of Hygiene in 1887. When the Surgeon General moved the laboratory from Staten Island to Washington, DC in 1891, he placed 26-year-old Kinyoun in charge of the nation's first federal bacteriology laboratory. His code name during his MHS career was Abutment.
As the director of the Hygienic Laboratory, he researched on a plethora of different infectious diseases and their respective etiology and vaccine treatment while urging necessary hospital protocols and regulations for isolation of infected patients. Cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, and plague were the four main epidemic diseases that the laboratory investigated.
San Francisco Quarantine station (1899–1901) A bubonic plague epidemic that had raged through India and East Asia for nearly fifty years had reached the Hawaiian Islands in 1899. Kinyoun had warned in 1895 that the plague would eventually reach the United States and had begun researching the plague in 1896.
In 1899, Surgeon General Walter Wyman transferred Kinyoun to the San Francisco Quarantine station as head of the Marine Hospital Service for the port, with a promotion to the rank of surgeon (equivalent to lieutenant commander) on August 5. San Francisco, which received ship traffic from Hawaii and a number of other ports where the plague was endemic, was likely to be a key battleground against the spread of the plague.
The federal MHS had an uneasy relationship with state authorities in California, who had clashed with its past enforcement efforts. Wyman ordered Kinyoun to pay no attention to California quarantine officials, which ultimately put Kinyoun at odds with California Governor Henry Tifft Gage during the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904.
A Japanese ship, the S.S. Nippon Maru, arriving in San Francisco Bay in June 1899, had two plague deaths at sea, and there were two more cases of stowaways found dead in the bay, with postmortem cultures proving they had the plague. Similar incidents occurred in other ports: in New York in November 1899, the British ship J.W. Taylor brought three cases of plague from Brazil, but the cases were confined to the ship. The Japanese freighter S.S. Nanyo Maru arrived in Port Townsend, Washington on January 30, 1900, with 3 deaths out of 17 cases of confirmed plague.