Vitamin

A Vitamin is an organic molecule required by a living organism in minute amounts for normal health. An organism deprived of all sources of a particular vitamin will eventually suffer from disease symptoms specific to the missing vitamin.

History

The value of eating certain foods to maintain health was recognized long before vitamins were identified. The ancient Egyptians knew that feeding a patient liver would help cure night blindness, now known to be caused by a Vitamin A deficiency. In 1747, the Scottish surgeon James Lind discovered that citrus foods helped prevent scurvy, a particularly deadly disease characterized by bleeding and severe pain. In 1753, Lind published his Treatise on the Scurvy.

Related Topics:
Egypt - Liver - Night blindness - Vitamin A - 1747 - Scottish - Surgeon - James Lind - Scurvy - 1753

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In 1905, William Fletcher discovered that eating unpolished rice instead of polished helped prevent the disease beriberi. The following year, Frederick Hopkins postulated that foods contained "accessory factors"—in addition to proteins, carbohydrates, fats, etc.—that were necessary to the human body. When Kazimierz Funk isolated the water-soluble complex of micronutrients whose bioactivity Fletcher had identified, he proposed that it be named "Vitamine". The name soon became synonymous with Hopkins' "accessory factors", and by the time it was shown that not all vitamins were amines, the word was ubiquitous. In 1920, Jack Cecil Drummond proposed that the final "e" be dropped, to deemphasize the "amine" reference, after the discovery that Vitamin C had no amine component, and the name has been "vitamin" ever since.

Related Topics:
1905 - William Fletcher - Rice - Beriberi - Frederick Hopkins - Protein - Carbohydrate - Fat - Kazimierz Funk - Amine - 1920 - Jack Cecil Drummond - Vitamin C

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Throughout the early 1900s, scientists were able to isolate and identify a number of vitamins by depriving animals of them. Initially, lipid from fish oil was used to cure rickets in rats, and the fat-soluble nutrient was called "antirachitic A". The irony here is that the first "vitamin" bioactivity ever isolated, which cured rickets, was initially called vitamine A, this bioactivity is now called vitamin D which is subject to the semantic debate that vitamin D is not truly a vitamin. What we now call "vitamin A" was identified in fish oil because it was inactivated by ultraviolet light. Most of what we now recognize as the water-soluble organic micronutrients were initially referred to as just one entity, "vitamin B".

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