invented “humoral” theory, which stated that foods must have the right balance of wet, dry, hot and cold to keep the body’s four essential humours – fire, earth, blood and phlegm – in check.
Casimir Funk read Eijkman’s paper and set himself the task of finding the chemical compound that gave brown rice its protective properties. In 1912, Funk managed to isolate a chemical that he thought was responsible and found it contained a characteristic nitrogen compound called an amine, so he named it a vital amine, or vitamine. When scientists eventually realised that vitamins didn’t necessarily need to contain an amine group, they dropped the final “e”.
Funk suggested that similar compounds might exist for many other “deficiency diseases”, as he called them, writing: “We will speak of a beriberi and scurvy vitamine, which means a substance preventing that special disease.” Funk also correctly suggested that vitamins existed that prevented the diseases pellagra and rickets.The compound that Funk isolated and dubbed an “anti beriberi factor” was what we now call vitamin B3, or niacin, which doesn’t actually prevent beriberi.
In the 35 years after Funk’s initial finding, scientists discovered the rest of the vitamins, which number 13 in total, including eight kinds of vitamin B and vitamins A, C, D, E and K. Funk continued working with vitamins, and for pharmaceutical companies, for the rest of his career. He produced the first widely used vitamin concentrate in the US, called OSCODAL, which contains liquid vitamin A and D.
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