Christiaan Eijkman
Dutch physician (1858-1930) · Netherlands · Doctors · Died at 72
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Something wrong?A Dutch physician who proved beriberi came from what people weren't eating - not from infection or toxin - and in doing so opened the door to vitamins as a concept the world had missed.
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Sibling: Johan Frederik EijkmanAbout this person
Christiaan Eijkman was born 11 August 1858 in the Netherlands and trained as a physician before turning to physiology. His work on beriberi, then a mysterious and often fatal disease, showed that diet - specifically, a deficiency - was the cause, a revelation that upended assumptions about illness. The demonstration led directly to the identification of antineuritic vitamins, what we now call thiamine. In 1929 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Sir Frederick Hopkins for the discovery of vitamins. He died 5 November 1930.
Doctors from the Netherlands 6
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