Abstract
The start of the history of vitamins can be traced back to 400 BC, when Hippocrates reported that eating liver could cure night-blindness. Much later, in the 16th century, the therapeutical effects of lemon juice against scurvy or scorbut became known; scorbut had inter alia caused the loss of 100 crew members on Vasco da Gama’s journey around Cape Hope. The English ship doctor James Lind studied this disease further and described in 1757 in his book A Treatise of Scurvy the beneficial effect of eating fresh vegetables and fruits in preventing it. For another nutritional deficiency disease (already mentioned in 1762 by Oviedo), the Italian doctor Francesco Frapoli used the name pellagra (pella = skin; agra = rough). In the 19th century in Japan, the Hikan child disease (keratomalacia and xerophthalmia) was successfully treated by including ale-fat, cod liver oil or chicken liver in the diet. Trousseau discovered that cod liver oil and also, direct sunlight, had a curing effect on rickets, a disease already well described by Whistler in 1645. In the Far-East, when hulled rice was replaced by dehulled or polished rice, a sharp increase in the occurrence of beriberi was observed. In 1897 Eijkman observed that poultry fed with polished rice developed polyneuritis, a disease very similar to human beriberi. This disease could also be prevented and cured by feeding rice and the silver fleece of the rice kernel. Grijns in 1901 hypothesised that beriberi was caused by a protecting factor, which was obviously lacking in dehulled rice. We now know that all these diseases are a result of nutritional vitamin deficiencies (Machlin, 1984).
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Vandamme, E.J. (1989). Vitamins and Related Compounds via Micro-Organisms: A Biotechnological View. In: Vandamme, E.J. (eds) Biotechnology of Vitamins, Pigments and Growth Factors. Elsevier Applied Biotechnology Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1111-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1111-6_1
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