For the past seven years I have been engaged in an investigation of scurvy both in the laboratory and in the clinic, and have treated various aspects of the subject in a large number of articles published in various medical journals. In the course of these studies there has been ample opportunity for a comprehensive …
Scurvy: Past and Present by Alfred F. Hess (1920) Read More »
Francis Glisson was an English physician who published in 1650 the first detailed and authoritative description of rickets. De Rachitide, written in Latin and translated into English the next year as A treatise of the rickets, being a disease common to children, described the signs, symptoms, and anatomical pathology of this disease which we now …
Lucy Wills was a British physician who discovered in the late 1920s and early 1930s that something in yeast cured macrocytic anemia. Called the “Wills Factor,” the substance was later identified as the B vitamin folate.
Christiaan Eijkman carried out what historian Kenneth Carpenter called “probably the most important work for the future of nutritional science to have been conducted anywhere in the world in the 1890s.” The Dutch physician stationed in Java was assigned the task of investigating the cause of beriberi and the best method of controlling it.
Trained as a bacteriologist, Harriette Chick began studying nutrient deficiencies during World War I in London. After the War, she was sent to Vienna to study dietary deficiencies in children. There she and her team confirmed the therapeutic value of cod liver oil for rickets, which helped establish the role of diet in that disease. …
David Marine was a Cleveland physician who conducted a large clinical trial on iodine supplementation for the prevention of goiter that led to the fortification of salt with the mineral in the United States.
Victor Herbert was a hematologist, Army veteran of four wars, and a staunch opponent of what he considered health fraud. His self-experimentation demonstrating that folate deficiency results in anemia is documented in Lawrence Altman’s book “Who Goes First?”
James Lind, a Scottish physician, conducted one of the first clinical trials in nutrition, demonstrating that certain foods could prevent scurvy. He was serving as a surgeon aboard a British ship-of-war patrolling the Bay of Biscay in 1747 when he tested six treatments on 12 sailors suffering from scurvy: cider, sulfuric acid, vinegar, seawater, citrus …
Alfred Hess was an independently wealthy New York City pediatrician who for 25 years financed his own research into the health problems of children at several labs in the city. The first part of his career, which involved experimentation on infants that today would be considered unethical, culminated in a monograph on scurvy in 1920.
Harry Steenbock was a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who showed that irradiation by ultraviolet light increased the vitamin D content of foods and other organic materials. Steenbock patented his invention with his own money, then donated the patent to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), which he helped start. WARF licensed …
Vedder was a career U.S. military physician who while stationed in the Philippines helped demonstrate that beriberi was a nutrient deficiency disease. In 1913, he published Beriberi, his best known monograph. On his return to the United States, he undertook research on scurvy.
