Eijkman's polished rice and beriberi

From about the 1860s beriberi devastated the Malay Archipelago, above all among soldiers, sailors, prisoners and imported laborers. In the long war with the sultanate of Aceh (Achin) the Dutch army and navy suffered severely; one army doctor reported 18 soldiers dying of it at his hospital in a single day. In 1886 the Dutch government sent a commission under Pekelharing and Winkler of the University of Utrecht to find the cause, and an army medical officer, Christiaan Eijkman (1858 to 1930), went as their assistant.

The commissioners were recalled in 1887. Eijkman became the first director of the laboratory they had set up in the military hospital at Batavia, a post he held from 1888 to 1896. There the laboratory chickens developed a polyneuritis much like beriberi. Efforts to show an infection failed, since even control birds kept apart fell ill, and then the disease suddenly cleared up. The laboratory keeper, Eijkman learned, had been feeding the chickens cooked polished rice from the hospital kitchen to save money, until a new cook refused to give military rice to civilian chickens. The birds ate polished rice from 17 June to 27 November; the disease broke out on 10 July and ended in the last days of November.

Feeding trials followed. Chickens on cooked polished rice fell ill after three to four weeks, while controls on unpolished rice stayed healthy, and sick birds could often be cured by changing their diet. Eijkman at first proposed that polished rice contained a toxin absent from whole rice. At his request the medical inspector Vorderman surveyed 101 prisons in Java with almost 300,000 inmates, where local custom set polished rice in some and rough rice in others. Beriberi was some 300 times more common where polished rice was the staple.

Grijns, who continued the work, found that a bean, katjang idju, protected chickens. The Nobel Foundation's biography of Eijkman says his work showed that beriberi came from the lack of a vital substance in the silver skin of the rice grain. In 1929 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Frederick Gowland Hopkins, for the discovery of the antineuritic vitamin.