The War Against Disease. Vitamins

A Dutch physician, Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930), was sent to Java in 1886 to study the disease beriberi. There was reason to think that the disease might be the result of imperfect diet. Japanese sailors had suffered from it extensively—then ceased suffering in the 1880s when a Japanese admiral added milk and meat to a diet that, previously, had been almost exclusively fish and rice.

Eijkman, however, was immersed in germ theory and was sure beriberi was a bacterial disease. He brought chickens with him and hoped to cultivate the germ in them. In this he failed. However, during the course of 1896, his chickens came down spontaneously with a disease very much like beriberi. Before Eijkman could do much about it, the disease vanished.

Searching for causes, Eijkman found that for a certain period of time the chickens had been fed on polished rice from the hospital stores and it was then they sickened. Put back on commercial chicken feed they recovered. Eijkman found further that he could produce the disease at will and cure it, too, by simply changing the diet.

Eijkman did not appreciate the true meaning of this at first. He thought there was a toxin of some sort in rice grains and that this was neutralized by something in the hulls. The hulls were removed when rice was polished, leaving the toxin in the polished rice unneutralized (so Eijkman thought).

However, why assume the presence of two different unknown substances, a toxin and an antitoxin, when it was only necessary to assume one: some food factor required in traces? The outstanding exponents of this latter view were Hopkins himself and a Polish-born biochemist, Casimir Funk (1884- ). Each suggested that not only beriberi, but also such diseases as scurvy, pellagra, and rickets were caused by the absence of trace food factors.

Under the impression that these food factors belonged to the class of compounds known as "amines," Funk suggested, in 1912, that these factors be named "vitamines" ("life amines"). The name was adopted, but since it turned out that the factors were not all amines, the name was changed to "vitamins."

The Hopkins-Funk "vitamin hypothesis" was borne out in full, and the first third of the twentieth century saw a variety of diseases overcome wherever sensible dietary rules could be established. As an example, the Austrian-American physician, Joseph Goldberger (1874-1929), showed, in 1915, that the disease, pellagra, endemic in the American south, was caused by no germ. Instead, it was due to the lack of a vitamin and it could be abolished if milk were added to the diet of those who suffered from it.

At first, nothing was known about the vitamins other than their ability to prevent and to cure certain diseases. The American biochemist, Elmer Vernon McCollum (1879- ), introduced, in 1913, the device of referring to them by letters of the alphabet, so that there was vita- min A, vitamin B, vitamin C, and vitamin D. Eventually, vitamins E and K were added. It turned out that food containing vitamin B actually contained more than one factor capable of correcting more than one set of symptoms. Biologists began to speak of vitamin Bi, vitamin B2 and so on.

It was the absence of vitamin Bi that brought on beriberi, and the absence of vitamin Be that caused pellagra. The absence of vitamin C led to scurvy (and it was the presence of vitamin C in small amounts in citrus fruits that had enabled Lind to cure scurvy) and the absence of vitamin D brought on rickets. The absence of vitamin A affected vision and caused night blindness. These were the major vitamin-deficiency diseases and as knowledge of vitamins increased, they ceased to be a serious medical problem.