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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, an illness now known to be caused by a vitamin A deficiency.
Vitamin Deficiency
In 1747, the Scottish surgeon James Lind discovered that citrus foods helped prevent scurvy, a particularly deadly disease in which collagen is not properly formed, causing poor wound healing, bleeding of the gums, severe pain and death. In 1753, Lind published his Treatise on the Scurvy, which recommended using lemons and limes to avoid scurvy, which was adopted by the British Royal Navy. This led to the nickname Limey for sailors of that organization.
ScurvyIn 1881, Russian surgeon Nikolai Lunin studied the effects of scurvy while at the University of Tartu in present-day Estonia. He conducted experiments to isolate the component parts of milk and established that there must be an ingredient which was necessary to life that was not yet understood.
BeriberiIn 1897, Christiaan Eijkman discovered that eating unpolished rice instead of the polished variety helped to prevent the disease beriberi. The following year, Frederick Hopkins postulated that some foods contained "accessory factors"—in addition to proteins, carbohydrates, fats, et cetera—that were necessary for the functions of the human body. Hopkins was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Christiaan Eijkman for their discovery of several vitamins.
Throughout the early 1900s, the use of deprivation studies allowed scientists to isolate and identify a number of vitamins.
Vitamin CIn 1931, Albert Szent-Györgyi and a fellow researcher Joseph Svirbely determined that "hexuronic acid" was actually vitamin C.
In 1937, Szent-Györgyi was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery.
Vitamin KIn 1943 Edward Adelbert Doisy and Henrik Dam were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of vitamin K and its chemical structure.
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