Beriberi - History

History

In Asia, where polished white rice (milled rice that has had its husk, bran, and germ removed) 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 Japanese medical doctor of the Japanese Navy, observed that beriberi was endemic among low-ranking crew who often were provided nothing but rice, but not among crews of Western navies and officers who consumed a Western-style diet.

In 1883, Kanehiro learned of a very high incidence of beriberi among cadets on a training mission from Japan to Hawaii, via New Zealand and South America that lasted more than 9 months, resulting 376 cases of sickness and 25 deaths on a ship of 169 men. With the support of the Japanese Navy, he conducted an experiment in which another ship was deployed on the same route, except that its crew was fed a diet of meat, fish, barley, rice, and beans. At the end of the voyage, this crew had suffered only 14 cases of beriberi and no deaths. This convinced Kanehiro and the Japanese Navy that diet was the cause.

In 1897, Dr. Christiaan Eijkman, a Dutch physician and pathologist, demonstrated that beriberi is caused by poor diet, and discovered that feeding unpolished rice (instead of the polished variety) to chickens helped to prevent beriberi. The following year, Sir Frederick Hopkins postulated that some foods contained "accessory factors"—in addition to proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and salt—that were necessary for the functions of the human body. In 1901, Gerrit Grijns (May 28, 1865 – November 11, 1944), a Dutch physician and assistant to Christiaan Eijkman in the Netherlands correctly interpreted the disease as a deficiency syndrome, and between 1910 and 1913, Dr. Edward Bright Vedder established that an extract of rice bran is a treatment for beriberi.

In 1929, Eijkman and Hopkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for this discovery.