Eijkman

Beriberi, Thiamine Deficiency. The recognition of vitamins and their importance to the health of human beings came about when Eijkman, a Dutch pathologist, was sent to Java in an attempt to cure an epidemic of beriberi that had appeared in one of the hospitals. Eijkman kept a flock of chickens on the hospital grounds to assist in discovering the disease agent he assumed was involved in the etiology of beriberi. These chickens were fed the scraps from the plates of the hospital patients—primarily poHshed rice, the common food in that part of the world (11). 

The abihty to iaduce disease states ia animals by manipulation of the diet was estabUshed ia this period. The classical work by Eijkman (5), ia which a heriheri-like condition was iaduced ia chickens fed on poHshed rice, was significant. These findings led to the concept by Hopkins that small amounts of accessory growth factors are necessary for survival and growth. 

Christiaan Eijkman medicine, physiology discovery of antineuritic vitamins... 

Thiamine, whose structure is shown in Figure 18.17, is known as vitamin Bj and is essential for the prevention of beriberi, a nervous system disease that has occurred in the Far East for centuries and has resulted in considerable sickness and death in these countries. (As recently as 1958, it was the fourth leading cause of death in the Philippine Islands.) It was shown in 1882 by the director-general of the medical department of the Japanese nayt that beriberi could be prevented by dietary modifications. Ten years later, Christiaan Eijkman, a Dutch medical scientist working in Java, began research that eventually showed that thiamine was the... 

CA.B. Boucher Department of Clinical Virology, Eijkman-Winkler Institute, University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands, C.Boucher umcutrecht.nl... 

Eijkman. Beri-beri induced in fowl by feeding polished rice, and corrected by an alcoholic extract from rice polishings. 

In 1912 a Polish scientist C. Frank pubhshed a paper in Journal of Physiology, in which he also reported an extracted compormd from rice bran with the same procedrrre as Srrzrrki reported and rramed the extracted substance Vitamin (which means vital amine). The comporrrrd is the same as that found by Srrzrrki. The Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1929 was awarded to C. Eijkman and F. G. Hopkirrs for their discovery and contributiorrs to Vitamin, but it is obvious that the discoverer of Vitamin is SrrzuM. Vitamin A was isolated in 1914, fom years after the discovery of Oryzanin Vitamin Bf... 

Frederick G. Hopkins and Christiaan Eijkman Physiology/Medicine Discovery of vitamins, tryptophan, vitamin Bj... 

Thiamine (= Vitamin B ) (pyrimidinylmethyl thiazole) dietary deficiency yields beriberi involving oedema, pain, neuritis, paralysis death detected by Christiaan Eijkman as polyneuritis in hens fed polished rice isolated from polishings by Jansen Donath... 

Vegetables, legumes, fruit, grain Christiaan Eijkman (Netherlands, Nobel Prize, Medicine, 1929, anti-neuritic Vitamin Bj in rice hull) ... 

A lack of thiamine in the diet causes the disease beri-beri, a nerve disease which in past years was common in the Orient, just before 1900 it was found by Eijkman in Java that beri beri occurred as a consequence of a diet consisting largely of polished rice, and that it could be cured by adding the rice polishings to the diet. In 1911 Casimir Funk assumed that beri-beri and similar diseases were due to a substance present in a satisfactory diet and missing from a deficient... 

Discovering the causes for beriberi became part of the history of discovering vitamins. Christian Eijkman (1858-1930) was a Dutch physician who was a member of a government commission sent to the East Indies in the 1880s to study the disease beriberi, which was prevalent in southeast Asia, where the main diet is comprised of unenriched rice and wheat. 

In Eijkman s laboratory he noticed that some of the fowl he was experimenting with developed paralysis and polyneuritis, as in the dry form of beriberi. The director of the hospital forbade Eijkman from feeding these birds with table scraps which consisted mainly of polished rice. He therefore began to feed them with whole rice, after which he noticed that they regained their movement and there was no recurrence of paralysis. 

The idea that the birds had some form of beriberi was rejected by Eijkman s colleagues. His explanation for the cure was that the polished rice had some toxin in it which the unpolished rice did not have. This explanation was rejected by a fellow researcher, Gerrit Grijns (1865-1944), who also stayed on to study the disease after the commission had already left. He found that when the chickens were taken off the rice diet completely and feed with meat instead, they did not develop the characteristic paralysis, but if the meat were overcooked, then the condition would reappear. In 1901 Grijns showed that beriberi could be cured by putting the rice polishings back into the rice. 

Eijkman, Christiaan (1858-1930) Nordic Physician Christiaan Eijkman was born on August 11, 1858, at Nijkerk in Gelderland (the Netherlands) to Christiaan Eijkman, the headmaster of a local school, and Johanna Alida Pool. He received his education at his father s school in Zaandam. In 1875 he entered the Military Medical School of the University of Amsterdam and received training as a medical officer for the Netherlands Indies Army. From 1879 to 1881 he wrote his thesis On Polarization of the Nerves, which gained him his doctor s degree, with honors, on July 13, 1883. On a trip to the Indies he caught malaria and returned to Europe in 1885. 

Eijkman was director of the Geneeskundig Labora-torium (medical laboratory) in Batavia from 1888 to 1896, and during that time he made a number of important discoveries in nutritional science. In 1893 he discovered that the cause of beriberi was the deficiency of vitamins, not of bacterial origin as thought by the scientific community. He discovered vitamin B, and this discovery led to the whole concept of vitamins. For this discovery he was given the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for 1929. 

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