Vitamins: History of Vitamins

By the mid-eighteenth century, the problem of scurvy on shipboard had led some doctors to suspect that a mysterious “element” in fresh fruits, vegetables, wine, and malted barley was necessary for life, even though most scientists still believed that only fats, carbohydrates, proteins, and salts were essential for adequate nutrition. Early advances in the search for this unknown element came from unexpected field trials associated with tragic circumstances. In 1747 James Lind was caring for sailors on the British ship Salisbury during a scurvy epidemic and selected twelve subjects for an experiment. He administered six different “anti-scorbutic” diets to pairs of the sick men, and the two who received citrus fruits recovered dramatically. The study, which Lind reported in A Treatise of the Scurvy (1753), led his pupil, Sir Gilbert Blane, to introduce citrus fruits to the required rations on British sailing ships.