Kinyoun, Joseph J. (Joseph James), 1860-1919

Born in East Bend, N.C., on 25 November 1860, Joseph James Kinyoun was raised in Centre View, Missouri. After studying for a year at the St. Louis Medical College, he attended the Bellevue Hospital Medical College where he received his M.D. degree in 1882. He also studied at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities, receiving a Ph.D. degree from the latter in 1896. He joined the Marine Hospital Service in 1886 and the following year established in a one-room laboratory on Staten Island, N.Y., the Hygienic Laboratory, later to become the National Institutes of Health. Kinyoun served as its director until 30 April 1899 at which time he was directed to assume command of the San Francisco Quarantine Station. He was soon embroiled in a controversy over the nature and extent of an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco, was relieved of his duties on 6 April 1901, and resigned from the service on 19 April 1902. After serving for a short time as research director for the H.K. Mulford Co. of Glenolden, Pa., he returned to Washington where he took up a private practice, directed the bacteriological laboratory for the District of Columbia, and, at the time of his death on 15 February 1919, was serving as the director of the Army Medical Museum.

Kinyoun was a physician, bacteriologist, first director of the Hygienic Laboratory. M.D. from Bellevue Hospital Medical College, 1882; Ph.D., Georgetown University, 1896. From 1887 to 1899 directed Hygienic Laboratory for the Marine Hospital Service, and from 1899 to 1901 directed plague activities in San Francisco.

Joseph James Kinyoun, M.D. (b. Nov. 25, 1860, East Bend, N.C.-d. Feb. 15, 1919, Washington, D.C.), physician and bacteriologist, was founder and first director of the United States Hygienic Laboratory, the predecessor of the National Institutes of Health.