Christiaan Eijkman

Christiaan Eijkman was a Dutch physician and physiologist whose work in colonial Java established that beriberi is caused by a dietary deficiency, leading to the discovery of vitamins. He was born in 1858 in Nijkerk in the Netherlands, the son of a school headmaster, and studied medicine at the University of Amsterdam.

After serving as a medical officer in the Dutch East Indies army, where he himself contracted malaria, he returned to Europe to train in bacteriology under Robert Koch in Berlin. In 1888 he was appointed director of a new laboratory in Batavia, now Jakarta, charged with investigating beriberi, a disease then ravaging soldiers, sailors, and prison inmates across the colony.

Working with chickens fed on polished white rice, Eijkman observed that the birds developed a polyneuritis closely resembling beriberi and recovered when given unpolished rice with the husk and bran intact. He at first interpreted the result through bacterial and chemical theories, but his careful experiments and those of his colleague Gerrit Grijns showed that something present in the rice husk and absent from the polished grain was essential to health.

Returning to the Netherlands in 1898, he became professor of public health at the University of Utrecht and later worked on water and food hygiene. In 1929 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins for the discovery of antineuritic vitamins. He died in Utrecht in 1930 at the age of seventy-two.

The name Christiaan is the Dutch form of Christian, from the Latin Christianus meaning follower of Christ. He carried that traditional Dutch name through a career that helped open the science of nutrition.