Do you have any idea when vitamins were discovered? I didn’t until I looked it up today. Thirteen vitamins were discovered between 1910 and 1948. Of course, long before that people had realized that some diseases (e.g. scurvy and beriberi) were caused by nutritional deficiencies rather than infections.
Here’s how one article’s abstract explains the term “vitamin”: “In 1911, [Polish biochemist] Casimir Funk isolated a concentrate from rice polishings that cured polyneuritis in pigeons. He named the concentrate “vitamine” because it appeared to be vital to life and because it was probably an amine. Although the concentrate and other ‘accessory food substances’ were not amines, the name stuck, but the final ‘e’ was dropped.” (Amines are chemical compounds such as amino acids.)
Here’s a list of discovery dates of vitamins (according to Wikipedia):
- Vitamin B1 – 1910
- Vitamin A – 1913
- Vitamin C – 1920
- Vitamin D – 1920
- Vitamin B2 – 1920
- Vitamin E – 1922
- Vitamin K1 – 1929
- Vitamin B5 – 1931
- Vitamin B7 – 1931
- Vitamin B6 – 1934
- Vitamin B3 – 1936
- Vitamin B9 – 1941
- Vitamin B12 – 1948
To sum up, today I learned that vitamins were not isolated until the 20th century. I also decided that the detective work that went into finding the cause of diseases like beriberi could make interesting reading when I find the time!
Interesting information! I also find it interesting that vitamin “deficiencies” go in and out of fashion. I put the word in quotation marks because people diagnose themselves with no proper evidence. Currently it is fashionable to talk about D deficiency. Twenty years ago it was E deficiency. A decade ago it was B12 deficiency. It’s hard to know what to believe in pop medical science.