VITAMINES 31 



standing arise, and not till quite lately was proof 

 driven home, that the disease only follows when 

 the rice eaten has been so treated as to lose some 

 essential constituent. The natural grain contains 

 a special constituent necessary to the body. Over- 

 milling removes this. Polished rice, unlike whole 

 rice, is a deficient food. Beri-beri is a deficiency 

 disease, due to reliance upon this food. 



Though not duly appreciated at first, evidence 

 for this really came with the arrival in the East 

 of modern milling machinery from the West. This 

 brought a very great increase in the number of cases 

 of beri-beri. Now the native methods of treating 

 rice before eating had been such as to leave essen- 

 tially untouched certain parts of the grain which 

 the steam mill on the other hand completely 

 removes. 



The advent of steam milling and the increase of 

 disease were not at once recognised as being corre- 

 lated ; but so far back as 1897 there was brought 

 forward what was irrefutable proof that beri-beri 

 depends not upon infection or staleness in the rice 

 taken as food, but upon the treatment the grain 

 had received in the mill. This proof was due to the 

 Dutch physician Eijkman. The statistics he used 

 dealt with no less than 279,621 individuals, all of 

 them at different times prisoners in the gaols of the 

 Dutch East Indies. The different prisons, owing to 

 their various situations with different and settled 



