Tag: Pellagra
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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…
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Corn, pellagra, and modern medicine—How an ancient disease was recognized in South Carolina’s state lunatic asylum
Brody FoglemanHarsh JhaNoel BrownleeJuliSu DiMucci-WardSpartanburg, South Carolina, United States Pellagra is a disease of vitamin B3 (niacin) deficiency. Niacin is the precursor for many physiologic processes involving nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), an enzyme that carries out long biochemical processes essential to a wide range of metabolic functions. While the understanding of niacin physiology is relatively…
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Andersonville, Georgia and Elmira, New York: When Hell was on Earth
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”— Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy When the American Civil War (1861–1865) began neither the Union nor the Confederacy gave much thought to housing prisoners-of-war (POWs). Eventually, the two opposing sides had a total of about 120 POW camps.1 The two armies had captured a total of…
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Pellagra: A medical whodunit
Putzer J. HungSaint Louis, Missouri, United States “What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?”– Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet Beginning in 1902, a strange epidemic struck the southern United States. Victims, often women and children of…
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“Our daily bread”—The scourge of pellagra
Meera LadwaLondon, England, United Kingdom In the northern Italian town of Ferrara hangs a little-known painting by Giuseppe Mentessi (1857–1931). Surrounded by a field of maize, a woman carries her exhausted child in her arms, her eyes downcast with suffering. Behind this painting lies a story of medicine, food, economics, and culture—the story of pellagra,…
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Cicely Williams and kwashiorkor
Sue ReevesRoehampton, London, UK Cicely Delphine Williams (1893–1992) has been described as achieving the ‘physician’s dream’1 by diagnosing, identifying the cause, and finding a prevention and a cure for a disease.2 The disease she identified was kwashiorkor, a severe form of protein-energy malnutrition, fatal if not treated promptly. Williams was the first woman to recognize…