The early history of vitamin C cannot readily be separated from that of the demise of scurvy. By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was generally accepted that it was possible to prevent and cure scurvy by the use of citrus fruits: James Lind’s contribution in establishing this belief was of paramount significance. But it was in essence a pharmacological concept rather than a nutritional one; the belief that the citrus fruits were replacing a missing dietary component would have been alien to medical thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century; even Lind himself did not regard fruit and vegetables as obligatory dietary principles in the prevention of scurvy. In other words, not until the end of the nineteenth century was there any general acceptance that scurvy was a deficiency disease resulting from a lack of a specific dietary principle and that the disease could be prevented or cured by appropriate dietary manipulation. Moreover, even this acceptance was complicated by the advent of the germ theory of disease which, some have argued, caused reversion to an infection theory to explain scurvy’s etiology.
One of the earliest thinkers to discuss these new ideas was George Budd (1808-82), Professor of Medicine at King’s College, London - although as K. C. Carter has indicated, Budd should perhaps be regarded as a developer rather than as an innovator of the “deficiency disease theory” (Hughes 1973; Carter 1977). In 1842, Budd published in the London Medical Gazette a series of articles entitled “Disorders Resulting from Defective Nutriment.” He described “three different forms of disease which are already traced to defective nutriment” and argued that such conditions resulted from the absence of dietary fac-tor(s) other than carbohydrate, fat, and protein, and that the absence of each of these specific factors would be associated with a specific disease - an idea that lay in abeyance for some 40 years until experimentally proved by N. Lunin. There can be little doubt that the three diseases described by Budd were avitaminoses A, C, and D.
L. J. Harris, himself a significant figure in the later history of vitamin C, aptly described Budd as “the prophet Budd” and referred to an article in which Budd expressed the belief that scurvy was due to the “lack of an essential element which it is hardly too sanguine to state will be discovered by organic chemistry or the experiments of physiologists in a not too distant future” (Budd 1840; Harris 1937:8).
Little happened, however, to fulfill Budd’s prophesy until the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1907, A. Holst and T. Frohlich of Norway reported experiments in which they had demonstrated that scurvy could be induced in guinea pigs and cured by dietary manipulation (Holst and Frohlich 1907;Wilson 1975). They used guinea pigs to assess the antiscorbutic value of different foodstuffs and to show the thermolabile nature of the antiscorbutic factor. At the same time there were parallel, but independent, developments in the general theory of vitamin deficiency diseases. F. G. Hopkins, developing earlier work by Lunin, C. A. Pekelharing, W. Stepp, and others, in 1912 published his classic paper in which he demonstrated the presence of growth factors in milk and showed their essential dietary nature (Hopkins 1912); in the same year, Casimir Funk introduced his “vitamin hypothesis,” in which he attributed scurvy to the absence of an “anti-scurvy vitamine” (Harris 1937:1-21).
The use of the guinea pig assay technique for the assessment of the antiscorbutic factor was extended, and in 1917, H. Chick and M. Hume published an important paper in which they reported the factor’s distribution in a number of foodstuffs (Chick and Hume 1917). The following year A. Harden and S. S. Zilva published their fractionation studies on lemon juice, in which they demonstrated that the antiscorbutic potency was not attributable (as had been suggested by earlier workers) to the citric acid content (Harden and Zilva 1918). The year after that, J. C. Drummond designated the factor “Water soluble C” (Drummond 1919).
World History
