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Volume 343:588 August 24, 2000 Number 8
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Beriberi, White Rice, and Vitamin B: A disease, a cause, and a cure

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By Kenneth J. Carpenter. 282 pp., illustrated. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000. $40. ISBN 0-520-22053-6.

For much of the past century, beriberi played a bit part on the stage of medical history as the disease that initially prompted the identification of vitamins and the elucidation of their role in human well-being. The Dutch colonial scientist Christiaan Eijkman, who noted that his chickens came down with beriberi when fed an experimental diet of white rice, has entered nutritional folklore along with James Lind and his lime and Joseph Goldberger and his elucidation of pellagra. Perhaps because it was uncommon in the West, or perhaps because it paled as a scourge of the 20th-century tropics beside such . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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