I02 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



that giving the hulls of rice would cure the malady. That was pioneering. 

 Alono- the trail came Takaki, who eliminated the disease known as "beri- 

 beri" from the Japanese navy. In Funk's paper, published in 191 1, entitled 

 "The Etiology of Deficiency Diseases," there appears for the first time the 

 word "vitamin," applied to a substance Funk had extracted from rice hulls, 

 with which polyneuritis in fowls and beriberi in man could be cured. The 

 blazing of the trail was completed, and road-building began. Knowledge 

 which previously had been developed was incorporated in the new nutri- 

 tional highway, knowledge of calories, of mineral materials, of the rela- 

 tive value in nutrition of different proteins, and already in a space of time 

 shorter than the lives of most of us firm foundations have been constructed 

 and the more dangerous turns of the road have been permanently erad- 

 icated. 



With this highway safe for travel, the next thing to be done was to 

 tell the people about it, to convince them of its stability, to provide rules 

 of the road which would insure safe driving and prevent "jay-walking." 

 The telling has been undertaken with unlimited enthusiasm, but not always 

 by those best qualified, and too frequently by men whose interest was 

 motivated by the commercial advantages obtainable. Promoting the vita- 

 mins, indeed, was done with such a blaring of trumpets that cautious men, 

 including many physicians, who had the real interest of the public health 

 at heart, became fearful that more harm would result than good. Their 

 cautiousness has aroused the resentment of some of the experimentalists in 

 nutrition which is not deserved. Physicians have learned from bitter expe- 

 rience to be critical of new knowledge pertaining to health. Their fingers 

 have been burned too often. 



Not more than thirty years ago, when knowledge about parasitic disease 

 had reached a stage of development comparable to what now is known 

 about nutrition, there still were surgeons and other educated people who 

 pooh-poohed the "germ theory." I well recall the extreme disgust with 

 which an orthopedic surgeon, having completed the manipulative care 

 of a fracture in a case also requiring blood letting, would call on his junior 

 associate to perform this part of the treatment and say to us students on 

 the benches: "This job is one for a 'sterile' surgeon." I remember too how 

 shocked we were that an older general surgeon refused to have anything 

 to do with rubber gloves and the then still new ideas about asepsis. Even 

 today the public has much to learn of the dangers which lurk in un- 

 pasteurized milk, and of the wherefores of public health measures. 



The attitude of the average doctor toward the newer knowledge of 

 nutrition is probably a reflection of the pubHc mind. Like newspapers, 

 they say, doctors give the pubHc what it wants, and health measures are 

 resisted by most people as infringements on personal rights. Doctors gen- 

 erally are called when somebody is sick. "Neither they nor the public 

 think primarily in terms of prevention. They don't seem to realize that 



