266 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 5 



majority concerning the influence of antiscorbutic foods remained 

 for many years vague and obscure. It was attributed to such quali- 

 ties as " freshness " without further analysis of these qualities, or 

 to known constituents without proof of their efficacy. True, so far 

 back as 1841, an American physician, G. Budd, had ascribed the 

 action of such foods " to an essential element which it is hardly too 

 sanguine to state will be discovered by organic chemistry or the 

 experiments of physiologists in a not far distant future." Had 

 organic chemists or physiologists been then stimulated by this ob- 

 jective view to seek for a definite substance in such well-known 

 antiscorbutic materials as, say, lemon or orange juice — a substance 

 which, when isolated, could display by itself the antiscorbutic pow- 

 ers of these fruits — it is likely that a realization of the significance 

 of vitamins might have come long ago; but current thought con- 

 cerning nutrition was not yet prepared to profit from such sug- 

 gestions. 



Scurvy, of course, is now recognized as one of a group of so-called 

 " deficiency diseases " — pathological conditions in each of which a 

 group of symptoms is displayed, directly due to the lack of some 

 necessary nutritional factor. It was in 1897 that evidence for the 

 existence of another such disease was clearly revealed. Eijkman, 

 a Dutch hygienist, had been led by extensive observations to the 

 belief that the disease beriberi was associated with the consumption 

 by human communities of polished rice as a basal food. He then 

 found that it is possible to produce an illness in fowls similar to 

 beriberi by feeding the birds on polished rice, and he was further 

 able to prevent or cure it by administering an extract of rice polish- 

 ings. The discovery that the disease could be thus produced and 

 cured experimentally greatly assisted its study; just as the later 

 observation of Hoist and Frohlich that the guinea pig rapidly dis- 

 plays the symptoms of scurvy when placed upon scorbutic diets, 

 while promptly cured by antiscorbutics, made easy the experimental 

 study of the latter disease and provided a ready biological test for 

 the presence and relative amounts of the curative agent in various 

 foods. 



The explanation first offered by Eijkman for the production of 

 beriberi during the consumption of polished rice was to the effect 

 that the condition is a state of intoxication brought about by the 

 consumption of excessive quantities of starch, and that in the so- 

 called " silver skin " which is removed by polishing, though not in 

 the bulk of the grain, there is a substance which counteracts the toxic 

 products of the disturbed metabolism. This hypothesis was far- 

 fetched and inhibitory, but the conception of disease as the direct 

 result of a specific deficiency in food was foreign to the thought of 



