“The first reliable index of the over-all prevalence of goitre in the USA resulted from the examination of 2 510 701 men drafted for military service during the First World War. Nearly 12 000 men had simple goitre and 31 % of these were rejected because their necks were so large that the collar of …
About 4,000 U.S. WWI draftees rejected for having enormous goiters Read More »
“…The goitre centres of the USA are found throughout the whole length of the Appalachian range, in all states bordering on the Great Lakes, westward through North Dakota, and into the far western states of Montana, Idaho, Utah, Oregon and Washington where the incidence is particularly heavy. Except for isolated pockets of high incidence in …
Goiter belt in United States in early 20th century Read More »
“Vasco da Gama began his expedition to India in 1497 and when his ships arrived on southeast coast of Africa, most of the crew were afflicted with scurvy…
The discovery of vitamin A’s visual function presents a good example in the history of science of the step-wise nature of discovery, according to George Wolf.
“The idea that something in food might be of advantage to patients with pernicious anemia was in my mind in 1912, when I was a house officer at the Massachusetts General Hospital…”
Deficiency diseases “were considered for years either as intoxications by food or as infectious diseases, and twenty years of experimental work were necessary to show that diseases occur which are caused by a deficiency of some essential substances in the food. Although this view is not yet generally accepted, there is now sufficient evidence to convince …
Casimir Funk sums up scientific evidence for “vitamines” in 1912 Read More »
By following a special diet almost completely lacking in the B vitamin folate, Victor Herbert (1927-2002) demonstrated during a 5-month study in 1961-1962 that a deficiency of this B vitamin leads to a particular kind of anemia called megaloblastic anemia.
“I was trained as a clinical scientist at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, and after my training, a strange set of circumstances brought me to Shiraz, Iran. The story of zinc began when an Iranian physician presented to me at the medical center grand rounds, a 21-y-old man who looked like a 10-y-old boy …
Zinc deficiency in humans discovered by Ananda Prasad Read More »
Eleven submitted to Experiments by U.S. Health Authorities All Develop Dread Disease Experiments Conducted by Dr. Goldberger Proved Unbalanced Diet Cause of Disease The Intelligencer (Anderson, South Carolina) November 2, 1915
Cicely Williams was a British colonial physician who, while serving in what is now Ghana, first described kwashiorkor, an ultimately fatal malnutrition affecting young children. Kwashiokor in the local language meant “disease of the displaced child” and occurred in those between 6 months and 4 years of age who were no longer being fed properly …
Joseph Goldberger was an outstanding investigator of infectious disease outbreaks for the U.S. Public Health Service, studying the causes of yellow fever, typhoid fever, denge fever, diphtheria, typhus, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and measles.
The seminal discovery that sunlight was important in the prevention of nutritional rickets was made in 1890 by Theobald A. Palm, a medical missionary who contrasted the prevalence of rickets in northern European urban areas with similar areas in Japan and other tropical countries.
Rickets, a disease of vitamin D deficiency, is rarely confronted by the practicing pediatrician in the United States today. At the turn of the 20th century, rickets was rampant among the poor children living in the industrialized and polluted northern cities of the United States. With the discovery of vitamin D and the delineation of …
From the publisher: The first modern survey of the long and fascinating history of the various ideas and theories about the cause of scurvy, the nutritional deficiency disease that has caused (with the exception of famine) the most human suffering in recorded history.
Hopkins was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discovery of the growth-stimulating vitamins.” Christiaan Eijkman shared the Prize “for his discovery of the antineuritic vitamin.” from Hopkins’ acceptance speech: “…Who was the “discoverer” of vitamins? This question has no clear answer. So often in the development of science, a fundamental …
Nobel Prize speech in 1929 by Frederick Gowland Hopkins Read More »
Gingival swelling and bleeding in a 45-year-old man from Papua New Guinea with scurvy.
