16 THE VITAMINS 



by the addition of the beans. He then made a decoction of the beans 

 which, by the successful treatment of 18 patients, he showed to contain 

 the substance needed for the cure of beriberi. As a further step he 

 purified the decoction by precipitation with basic lead acetate and sub- 

 sequent removal of the lead. With this purified preparation he cured 

 four cases of human beriberi, and both cured and prevented the poly- 

 neuritis of fowls. Plainly these experiments afiforded very strong evi- 

 dence that the polyneuritis of fowls induced by feeding polished rice 

 is essentially the same condition as beriberi and that both are due to 

 the lack of a definite substance, which occurs in rice polishings, beans, 

 and some other foods. 



Chamberlain and Vedder of the United States Army medical com- 

 mission for the study of tropical diseases in the Philippines made 

 considerable progress in the study of the chemical nature of the sub- 

 stance which prevents and cures beriberi in man and experimental poly- 

 neuritis in fowls and concluded that it was an organic base but not an 

 alkaloid. 



The work looking toward chemical identification of the active sub- 

 stance thus begun by Hulshofif-Pol and by Chamberlain and Vedder 

 was then taken up by Funk, who in a paper published in December 

 1911, first claimed to have isolated the active substance in an approxi- 

 mately pure state. He gave to it the name beriberi vitamine. The name 

 vitamine thus introduced by Funk was obviously designed to indicate 

 that the substance in question was an amine essential to life or bearing 

 special relationship to vitality. He believed this substance to be a com- 

 bination of nicotinic acid with a pyrimidine base, and predicted that 

 other substances would be found to bear the same relation to other 

 "deficiency diseases" which this "beriberi vitamine" bears to beriberi 

 and experimental polyneuritis. 



Even in 1907, Hoist had described experimental studies of ship 

 beriberi and scurvy, and now at practically the same time that Funk 

 put forward this suggestion, Hoist and Frolich of Christiania published 

 (1912) the results of several years of systematic work upon experi- 

 mental scurvy. Because of its importance to the Norwegian fisherman 

 and merchant marine, they had been interested in the study of ship 

 beriberi and had felt that the application of laboratory experiments to 

 human therapeutics and prophylaxis would rest upon a more satisfac- 

 tory basis if they could produce the disease experimentally in mammals 

 rather than fowls or pigeons. They found, however, that the guinea pig 

 when kept upon a diet of polished rice developed the symptoms of 

 scurvy instead of beriberi, and that scurvy also developed when whole 



