Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: beriberi

  • Christiaan Eijkman, unpolished rice, and the discovery of vitamins

    In 1883, a young Dutch physician, Christiaan Eijkman, arrived to work on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. Born in 1858, he took his preliminary examinations in 1875, became a student at the Military Medical School of the University of Amsterdam, and obtained his doctorate by working on the physiology of the…

  • Liver, lime, and vitamins

    The history of vitamins traces back to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, who observed that certain foods were important in maintaining health. These observations were later supplemented by clinical studies. Among these studies were those of the Russian physician Nikolai Lunin. As a student in Basel in 1881, he fed groups of mice with…

  • Darling of Panama

    Enrique Chaves-Carballo Kansas City, Kansas, United States Samuel Taylor Darling, widely considered as the foremost American tropical parasitologist and pathologist of his time, was born in Harrison, New Jersey on April 6, 1872. He studied medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Baltimore, graduating in 1903 at the top of his class and…

  • Grandfather of allergy: Dr. Bill Frankland, the ardent centenarian

    John TurnerUnited Kingdom “For your final choice?” Dr. William Frankland at one hundred and three, the oldest guest ever to appear in the London studio of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, chose Elgar’s Nimrod in tribute to his fallen comrades while recalling his deliverance from Far East imprisonment.1 August 1945 and the Second World War…