82 The Philippine Journal of Science 1915 
Simple and ideal as this method of treatment looks, when 
put in practice it offers very serious inconveniences inherent 
in the sudden and untimely discontinuance of maternal feeding. 
To put the baby to a wet nurse is a wise procedure, but this 
offers a great expense which cannot be afforded by this kind of 
patients, for the great majority of them belong to the poorer 
class. To substitute artificial feeding for breast feeding is to 
expose the infant to the dangers of gastrointestinal and other 
nutritional disturbances which usually accompany artificial feed- 
ing. In addition, there is the difficulty or the impossibility of ob- 
taining fresh milk or canned milk and other farinaceous food 
preparations because of pecuniary reasons as already mentioned. 
In view of these inconveniences and believing that this disease 
is due to some deficiency in diet, Bréaudat of Indo-China in 
1910 and Gabriel and Luis Guerrero of these Islands in 1911 
fed the mothers of beriberic infants with rice polishings (tiqui- 
tiqui) and mongo—two well-known antiberiberic foodstuffs. 
By this method the mother is given daily about 60 grams of 
tiqui-tiqui and about 150 grams of mongo, prepared in different 
palatable ways so that its ingestion is made agreeable. 
Only 18 cases have been treated by this method in the Phil- 
ippine Islands. The method has two inconveniences: First, the 
tiqui-tiqui is very unpalatable and disagreeable to take, and, 
secondly, breast feeding has to be discontinued for a period of 
from fifteen to forty-five days according to the method of Luis 
Guerrero. Because of these inconveniences Bréaudat’s method 
did not become widespread. 
Following the theory of “avitaminosis’’ and drawing their 
conclusions from the prophylactic and curative actions of the 
extract of tiqui-tiqui on “polyneuritis gallinarum,’ Chamberlain 
and Vedder, of the United States Army board for the study of 
tropical diseases, in February, 1912, recommended the use of the 
extract in the treatment of infantile beriberi without the dis- 
continuance of the maternal feeding, thus avoiding the dangers 
of artificial feeding. The method of preparation of this extract 
is fully described in their paper. Five cubic centimeters of 
the extract thus prepared represent about 82 grams of rice 
polishings. The dose prescribed by them was 5 cubic centime- 
ters of the extract a day given in 20-drop doses every two hours 
while the child is awake. 
I have had the opportunity of using this extract in a great 
many cases of infantile beriberi, from the year 1912 to the 
* Bull. Manila Med. Soc. (1912), 4, 26. 
