Eijkman, Christiaan

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. 

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... 

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) ... 

Christiaan Eijkman, Frederick Gowland Hopkins Antineuritic vitamin and the growth-stimulating vitamins... 

In 1896, Dutch physician Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930) found that animals developed beriberi only if they ate polished rice—rice from which hulls had been removed. He learned that the animals recovered if they ate rice with hulls still on it. His colleague Gerrit Grijins (1865-1944) believed that the rice hulls contained some substance that prevented beriberi. By 1910, Umetaro had found that substance, aberic acid. 

The actual origin of beriberi was however discovered by the Dutchman Christiaan Eijk-man (1858-1930) at a military hospital of the Dutch colony of Java in 1896, and he thereby provided the basis ofvitaminology (Fig. 7.5). [5] He recognised that rice, as such, did not make the patients and staff ill, but polished rice , which had been mechanically freed from the rice bran. Eijkman suspected an indispensable nutrient in the rice bran, since it emerged that the bran, or extracts from it, cured beriberi. The chance observation, that chickens Gallusgallus domesticus) at the hospital (which were fed with polished rice, because their usual feed had run out) developed characteristic symptoms of a beriberi-like illness, led Eijkman to the conclusion, that poultry could also be taken iU with beriberi. Thus, for the first time, experimental researching into beriberi was possible. 

Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930) recognised in beriberi an "avitaminosis", and thereby laid the foundation stone of vitamin research. 

Dutch physician Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930) cures beriberi in chickens with diet of whoie rice. 

A lack of thiamine in the diet causes the disease beri-beri, a nerve disease that in past years was common in the Orient. Just before 1900 it was found by Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930) 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 lack of a substance present in a satisfactory diet and missing from a deficient diet, and he attempted to isolate the substance whose lack was responsible for beri-beri. He coined the name vitamin for substances of this sort (he spelled it vitamine because he thought that the substances were amines). The structure of vitamin B thiamine, was determined by R. R. Williams, E. R. Buchman, and their collaborators in 1936. 

Similar observations were made by a Dutch physician, Christiaan Eijkman, in the Dutch colonies in Indonesia. While investigating the cause for a massive outbreak of beriberi, a disease characterized by paralysis, he noted that the hens in the laboratory began to exhibit a form of paralysis as well. He discovered that they were being fed rice from which the fibrous husk had been removed (called polished rice). When he fed the hens raw whole rice, their condition improved drastically. It was therefore realized that the fibrous husk of rice contained some vital growth factor. In 1912, Polish biochemist Casimir Funk isolated the active compound from rice husks. Careful studies revealed that the structure contained an amino group, and therefore belongs to a class of compounds called amines (see Chapter 23) ... 

In 1897, Christiaan Eijkman, a Dutch physician, working in a military hospital in the East Indies, produced polyneuritis, a condition resembling beriberi, in chickens, pigeons, and ducks by feeding polished rice which he wron ully attributed to too much starch. 

Fifteen years later (1897), Christiaan Eijkman, a Dutch physician assigned to a prison hospital in the East Indies, observed beriberi among the inmates and sought the answer through experiments with chickens. To save money, he fed the birds scraps—mostly polished rice— from the patients meals. The chickens unexpectedly developed a bad nerve ailment, which resulted in paralysis. 

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