Christiaan Eijkman and beriberi

During the time period of the Dutch beriberi problem in Indonesia, physicians were preoccupied with the concept that diseases were cause by pathological problem.

In 1886 Christiaan Eijkman and other physicians began the quest for identifying the beriberi microbe and developing procedures for eliminating the disease. As a former student of Robert Koch, he had been trying to isolate and infect chickens with ‘beriberi bacteria’.

Early discovery, which demonstrated the specificity of the dietary essentials, was Eijkman’s production of beriberi on chickens in 1897 by feeding them polished rice.

Christiaan Eijkman

The polished cooked rice had resulted in beriberi symptoms of peripheral neuritis. This disease was prevented or cured by feeding either a diet of unpolished rice or a diet to which alcoholic extract of rice bran was added. Eijkman thought that a toxin in rice was being unmasked in the conversion of brown to white rice.

In 1901, Gerrit Grijns, Eijkman’s successor, observed that chicken fed on raw meat did not develop polyneuritis whereas those exclusively fed on meat that has been heated long enough at 120° C developed the disease.

After further work, his statement in 19o1 was perhaps the progenitor of the “vitamin era” in nutritional research: “There occur in various natural foods substances which cannot be absent without serious injury… they are easily disintegrated … and cannot be replaced by simple chemical compounds.”
Christiaan Eijkman and beriberi

Discovery of thiamine

Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930) was trained as a prison medical officer for the Netherlands Indies Army. 

Many of his prisoners had the disease of beriberi. They were fed a diet of primarily polished rice. Beriberi was first described in 1628 in Batavia by the Dutch physician Jacobus Bontius one of the pioneers of tropical medicine.

Eijkman in his experiment inoculated chickens with material from patients ill with beriberi. His inoculated chickens did develop polyneuritis but so did uninoculated chickens.

In 1889, just at the beginning of his investigation, beriberi in his chickens disappeared. Eijkman had tried unsuccessfully to isolate infectious agents that might have been responsible for beriberi.

Eijkman later discovered that a new cooked had changed the diet fed to the chickens. The chicken diet returned to the lowly unpolished rice, and with this change, the chicken neuritis disappeared.

Eijkman demonstrated that of the chickens were fed unpolished rice their symptoms reversed. He showed that there was a substance in the outer layers and germ of the rice grain that protected the chickens from the disease.

It was not until 1926 that the substance was finally isolated in crystalline form by Barend Coenraad Petrus Jansen and Willem Frederik Donath.

An American physician, Edward Bright Vedder (1878-1952) of the US Army Medical Corps in the Philippines, determined to find out what is was in the rice that treated beriberi.

In 1933 William succeeded in determining the structure of thiamine, ahead of his many competitors. Three years later together with Joseph K. Cline and Jacob Finkeltstein, he had synthesis thiamine.

Christiaan Eijkman was awarded Nobel Prize in 1929 in physiology or medicine for his work involving thiamine.
Discovery of thiamine

History of Beriberi

Beriberi is a nutritional disorder caused by a deficiency of thiamin (vitamin B1). It is a characterized primarily by impairment of the nerves and heart.

Beriberi is found in Chinese medical writings 1200 years ago, and knowledge of the disease existed in Japan for about as long.

The disease was accurately described for the first time in 1629 by the Leiden physician Jacobs de Bondt.

He noted that the word ‘beriberi’ was derived from a local word for sheep because of the tottering walk of those affected disease.

However, it only became important when disease when the introduction of steel rice mills. Then, for fifty years, from 1870 to 1920, it was dominant disease in the East.

In the 1880s, the Japanese navy reported that beriberi had been eradicated among its sailors as a result do adding extra meat, fish and vegetables to their regular diet.

In 1918 Casimir Funk demonstrated that beriberi like symptoms induced in pigeon could be cured by feeding them with rice that was supplemented with a concentrated made from rice polishings.

In 1873, a Dutch naval surgeon, Van Leent, noted an alarming 70 percent rate of beriberi among Javanese sailors servings in the Ditch Eats Indies fleet, whereas among the European sailors it was less than 1 percent.

Christiaan Eijkman received Nobel Prize in 1929 when he induced beriberi-like polyneuritis gallinarum in fowl in Batavia by feeding them a diet of polished rice.
History of Beriberi