Discovery of Vitamins and Deficiency Diseases

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Christiaan Eijkman did not set out to discover vitamins. He was a Dutch physician stationed in the Dutch East Indies, tasked with finding the infectious agent behind beriberi, a disease that produced weakness, paralysis and, in its worst form, heart failure among people whose diet centered on rice. The clue arrived by accident, in his own laboratory's chicken coop: birds that had been fed leftover polished rice from military rations began developing symptoms resembling beriberi themselves.

Then a new cook, unwilling to feed military rice to civilian birds, switched the chickens back to unpolished rice, and within days the birds recovered. Eijkman methodically ruled out the explanations his training pointed him toward first, blood contamination, respiratory changes, temperature, and was left with a conclusion nobody in infectious disease medicine expected: polished rice was missing something unpolished rice still had. During his 1888 to 1896 directorship of that laboratory, he identified the pattern, decades before anyone would call the missing substance a vitamin, or know it as vitamin B1, thiamine.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to two men, Christiaan Eijkman and Frederick Gowland Hopkins, for discoveries that approached the same idea from opposite directions: Eijkman from a disease he could not explain, and Hopkins from a controlled feeding experiment showing that rats on a diet of pure proteins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals and water stopped growing until a small amount of milk restored the missing piece. Hopkins published the finding in 1912 in the Journal of Physiology and called the missing substances accessory food factors, a name that did not survive.

The name that did survive belongs to neither laureate. Polish biochemist Casimir Funk, working on his own attempt to isolate the anti-beriberi substance from rice polishings, coined the word vitamine in a 1912 paper in the Journal of State Medicine, combining vital and amine on the mistaken assumption that the substance was chemically an amine. The chemistry turned out to be wrong and the word was shortened to vitamin once other such compounds were found not to be amines at all, but Funk's name is the one that stuck in every language that discusses the discovery, even though the Nobel committee's recognition went to Eijkman and Hopkins alone.