In 1747, the Scottish surgeon
James Lind discovered that
citrus foods helped prevent
scurvy, a particularly deadly disease in which
collagen is not properly formed, causing poor wound healing, bleeding of the
gums, severe pain, and death. In 1753, Lind published his
Treatise on the Scurvy, which recommended using lemons and
limes to avoid
scurvy, which was adopted by the British
Royal Navy. This led to the nickname
limey for British sailors. Lind's discovery, however, was not widely accepted by individuals in the Royal Navy's
Arctic expeditions in the 19th century, where it was widely believed that scurvy could be prevented by practicing good
hygiene, regular exercise, and maintaining the
morale of the crew while on board, rather than by a diet of fresh food. In 1881,
Russian medical doctor
Nikolai I. Lunin studied the effects of scurvy at the
Imperial University of Dorpat. He fed mice an artificial mixture of all the separate constituents of milk known at that time, namely the
proteins, fats,
carbohydrates, and
salts. The mice that received only the individual constituents died, while the mice fed by milk itself developed normally. He made a conclusion that substances essential for life must be present in milk other than the known principal ingredients. However, his conclusions were rejected by his advisor,
Gustav von Bunge. In East Asia, where polished
white rice was the common staple food of the middle class,
beriberi resulting from lack of vitamin B1 was
endemic. In 1884,
Takaki Kanehiro, a British-trained medical doctor of the
Imperial Japanese Navy, observed that beriberi was endemic among low-ranking crew who often ate nothing but rice, but not among officers who consumed a Western-style diet. With the support of the Japanese Navy, he experimented using crews of two
battleships; one crew was fed only white rice, while the other was fed a diet of meat, fish, barley, rice, and beans. The group that ate only white rice documented 161 crew members with beriberi and 25 deaths, while the latter group had only 14 cases of beriberi and no deaths. This convinced Takaki and the Japanese Navy that diet was the cause of beriberi, but they mistakenly believed that sufficient amounts of protein prevented it. That diseases could result from some dietary deficiencies was further investigated by
Christiaan Eijkman, who in 1897 discovered that feeding unpolished rice instead of the polished variety to chickens helped to prevent beriberi. The following year,
Frederick Hopkins postulated that some foods contained "accessory factors" — in addition to proteins, carbohydrates, fats
etc. — that are necessary for the functions of the human body. 's single-paragraph article in 1920 which provided structure and nomenclature used today for vitamins In 1910, the first vitamin complex was isolated by Japanese scientist
Umetaro Suzuki, who succeeded in extracting a water-soluble complex of micronutrients from rice bran and named it
aberic acid (later
Orizanin). He published this discovery in a Japanese scientific journal. When the article was translated into German, the translation failed to state that it was a newly discovered nutrient, a claim made in the original Japanese article, and hence his discovery failed to gain publicity. In 1912 Polish-born biochemist
Casimir Funk, working in London, isolated the same complex of micronutrients and proposed the complex be named "vitamine". It was later to be known as vitamin B3 (niacin), though he described it as "anti-beri-beri-factor" (which would today be called thiamine or vitamin B1). Funk proposed the hypothesis that other diseases, such as rickets,
pellagra,
coeliac disease, and scurvy could also be cured by vitamins.
Max Nierenstein, a friend and reader of Biochemistry at Bristol University, reportedly suggested the "vitamine" name (from "vital amine"). The name soon became synonymous with Hopkins' "accessory factors", and by the time it was shown that not all vitamins are
amines the word was already ubiquitous. In 1920,
Jack Cecil Drummond proposed that the final "e" be dropped to deemphasize the "amine" reference, after researchers began to suspect that not all "vitamines" (in particular,
vitamin A) have an amine component. In 1931,
Albert Szent-Györgyi and a fellow researcher Joseph Svirbely suspected that "hexuronic acid" was actually
vitamin C, and gave a sample to
Charles Glen King, who proved its anti-
scorbutic activity in his long-established
guinea pig scorbutic assay. In 1937, Szent-Györgyi was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this discovery. In 1938,
Richard Kuhn was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on carotenoids and vitamins, specifically B2 and B6. In 1943,
Edward Adelbert Doisy and
Henrik Dam were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of
vitamin K and its chemical structure. In 1967,
George Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (jointly with
Ragnar Granit and
Haldan Keffer Hartline) for the discovery that vitamin A could participate directly in a physiological process. ==See also==