Download Beriberi, White Rice and Vitamin B: A Disease, a Cause and a Cure

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Beriberi, White Rice and Vitamin B: A Disease, a Cause and a Cure
Kenneth J. Carpenter
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000, xiv + 296 p,, US
$40.00
I
This is the third venture in the history of nutrition completed by Carpenter,
Emeritus Professor of Nutrition at the University of California, Berkeley. It is
presented as a detective story in which the heroes are a multinational group of
scientists working hard to piece together the clues that would solve the puzzle
of a crippling, sometimes fatal disease. Drawing on existing accounts and the
published papers of those involved, he reconstructs the identification of beriberi as a deficiency disease and the development of vitamin therapy as its cure.
The primary focus of the study is on the development and acceptance of scientific knowledge rather than the wider social and cultural context in which these
developments took place. This does not mean, however, that this account is designed simply to sing the praises of great men of science. Rather Carpenter is
fully sensitive to the role of the social, political, and cultural context, here frequently a colonial one, in determining the problems tackled by scientists, the resources at their disposal, and the ways in which their ideas were received and
implemented. He recognizes the contested nature of scientific knowledge and
makes an effort to understand the ideas of his protagonists in the context of the
accepted wisdom of their own time. The result is an account which goes far beyond offering a purely internalist/intellectual history without going as far in
the other direction as many historians would like.
The story begins in Japan with a discussion of the disease known as kakke,
identified as the national disease of Japan by German physicians invited to the
country during the 1870s. The focus then moves to the Dutch East Indies and a
reassessment of the most well-known contributor to this story, Christiaan
Eijkmann. As a former student of Robert Koch, Eijkmann, like his predecessor
in charge of investigations in qakarta, Pekelharing, began by believing that he
was dealing with an infectious disease and used the techniques of the newly
emerging discipline of bacteriology to investigate it. Only gradually did he
modify his ideas and start to attribute the disease to the diet fed to his chickens.
For this research, he was later awarded a Nobel Prize. On his return to the Netherlands, however, Eijkmann found it difficult to replicate his work and reverted
to his former belief that is was an infection, albeit one whose virulence could be
reduced by appropriate diets. Attention then turns to British research, particularly that carried out in Malaya which involved the practical implementation of
the ideas earlier advocated by the Dutch. The emergence of international collaboration and the entry of US researchers into the field is assessed in Chapter 6.
The focus them moves firmly into the laboratory and efforts to isolate and synthesise vitamin B. The final five chapters contain little of interest to historians,
concentrating as they do on current food analysis and debates about the appropriate level of vitamin B intake, although some of the discussion on the problems of effectively applying nutrition knowledge to improve public health may
be useful.
Overall this is a thoroughly readable account which achieves its aim of integrating the stories of those from many different nations who worked on what
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has come to be known as beriberi without challenging the conclusions of existing accounts. It leaves plenty of scope for more detailed and archive-based
studies of its protagonists and for the reassessments these bring.
SALLYM MORROCKS
Lltziversit!y ofLeicester