The Vitamine Manual | Page 2

as beri-beri. This disease is common in Japan, the Philippines and other lands where the diet consists mainly of rice, and while the disease itself was well known its cause and cure had baffled the medical men for many years. Today in magazines, newspapers and street car advertisements people are urged to use this or that food or medicament on the plea of its vitamine content. In less than ten years the study of vitamines has increased to such an extent that it is difficult to find a chemical journal of any month of issue that does not contain one or more articles bearing on the subject. Such a rapid rise to public notice suggests an importance that justifies investigation by the laity as well as the chemist and in the pages that follow has been outlined in simple language the biography of this newest and lustiest of the chemist's children.
Dr. Funk christened one individual but the family has grown since 1911 to three members which for lack of better names are now called vitamines "A," "B," and "C." There are now rumors of another arrival and none dare predict the limits of the family. Had these new substances been limited to their relation to an obscure oriental disease they would have of course commanded the medical attention but it is doubtful whether the general public would have found it worth while to concern themselves. It is because on better acquaintance they have compelled us to reform our ideas on nutrition of both adults and babies and pick out our foods from a new angle, that we accord them the attention they demand and deserve. Granting then, their claim upon our attention, let us review our present knowledge and try to see with just what we are dealing. This will be more easily accomplished if we consider the vitamines first from the historical side and reserve our attention to details of behavior until later.
A limited diet of polished rice and fish is a staple among the peoples of the Orient. When the United States Government took over the Philippine Islands in 1898 it sent there a small group of scientists to establish laboratories and become acquainted with the peculiarities of the people and their troubles. One of the first matters that engaged their attention was the condition of the prisons which were most unsanitary and whose inhabitants were poorly fed and treated. Reforms were put into operation at once and the sanitary measures soon changed these prisons to places not quite so abhorrent to the eye. In trying to improve the diets of the prisoners little change was made in their composition because of the native habits but the reformers saw to it that the rice fed should be clean and white. In spite of these measures the first year saw a remarkable increase in the disease of beri-beri, and the little group of laboratory scientists had at once before them the problem of checking a development that bid fair to become an epidemic. In fact, the logical discoverers of what we now know as the antineuritic vitamine or vitamine "B" should have been this same group of laboratory workers for it was largely due to their work between the years 1900 and 1911 that the ground was prepared for Funk's harvest.
The relation of rice to this disease was more than a suspicion even in 1898. In 1897 a Dutch chemist, Eijkman, had succeeded in producing in fowls a similar set of symptoms by feeding them with polished rice alone. This set of symptoms he called polyneuritis and this term is now commonly used to signify a beri-beri in experimental animals. Eijkman found that two or three weeks feeding sufficed to produce these symptoms and it was he who first showed that the addition of the rice polishings to the diet was sufficient to relieve the symptoms. Eijkman first thought that the cortical material contained something necessary to neutralize the effects of a diet rich in starch. Later however, he changed his view and in 1906 his position was practically the view of today. In that same year (1906) F. Gowland Hopkins in England had come to the conclusion that the growth of laboratory animals demanded something in foods that could not be accounted for among the ordinary nutrients. He gave to these hypothetical substances the name "accessory food factors." To Hopkins and to Eijkman may therefore be justly attributed the credit of calling the world's attention to the unknown substances which Funk was to christen a little later with the name vitamines. Other workers, of course, knew of these experiments of Eijkman and Hopkins and in 1907 two of them, Fraser and Stanton, reported that by extracting rice polishings with alcohol they had secured a product which if added