1915] Casmiir Funk 305 



intoxication or an Infection. The remarkable increase in the fre- 

 quency of its incidence during the past twenty-five years suggested 

 to several excellent workers in tropical medicine that the greater 

 number of recent cases has been due to the introduction of modern 

 machinery for the decortication of rice. It was shown that in cer- 

 tain parts of the Malay States and India, where either hand-milled 

 rice or parboiled rice (rice steamed previous to decortication) is 

 used, the incidence of beriberi is much less frequent than in parts 

 where machine-milled rice is used as food. A suspicion arose that 

 with the removal of the superficial layers of the rice grain, an in- 

 gredient is lost which is essential for the maintenance of life on a 

 rice diet. This lost constituent was regarded, at first, as a kind of 

 antidote, or antitoxin, against hypothetical intestinal poisons pro- 

 duced during the digestion of rice. 



Uncertainty continued until 1897, when Eijkman observed that 

 fowls, which had been fed on residues of food supplied in a hospital 

 with beriberi patients, developed a disease that closely resembled 

 human beriberi. This condition in fowls was called Polyneuritis 

 gallinarum. This very important discovery paved the way for the 

 experimental investigation of beriberi. 



Eijkman found, also, that alcoholic extracts of rice-polishings 

 cured experimental Polyneuritis in chickens. He believed the effects 

 of such extracts were due to the presence of an antidote. Schau- 

 mann, in 1910, advanced another theory, which was based on the 

 alleged fact that foodstuffs able to eure Polyneuritis contain high 

 percentages of organic phosphorus. He concluded, therefore, that 

 beriberi is due to lack of organo-phosphorus Compounds in the 

 food. In accord with this view, he found that yeast is an excellent 

 curative agent. The phosphorus-deficiency theory was advanced at 

 a time when there was a widespread belief that lipoids had im- 

 portant physiological and pharmacological properties. Recently it 

 has been shown that the animal organism is able to synthesize lipoids 

 and other organo-phosphorus Compounds f rom phosphoric acid, pro- 

 vided the remaining constituents (radicals) are available. We 

 now know, also, that the importance hitherto attributed to lipoids 

 was dependent very largely upon substances of basic nature which 

 occurred incidentally in lipoid f ractions. The phosphorus-deficiency 



