A limited diet of polished rice and fish is a staple among the peoples of
the Orient. When the United States Government took over the Philippine
Islands in 1898 it sent there a small group of scientists to establish
laboratories and become acquainted with the peculiarities of the people
and their troubles. One of the first matters that engaged their attention
was the condition of the prisons which were most unsanitary and whose
inhabitants were poorly fed and treated. Reforms were put into operation
at once and the sanitary measures soon changed these prisons to places not
quite so abhorrent to the eye. In trying to improve the diets of the
prisoners little change was made in their composition because of the
native habits but the reformers saw to it that the rice fed should be
clean and white. In spite of these measures the first year saw a
remarkable increase in the disease of beri-beri, and the little group of
laboratory scientists had at once before them the problem of checking a
development that bid fair to become an epidemic. In fact, the logical
discoverers of what we now know as the antineuritic vitamine or vitamine
"B" should have been this same group of laboratory workers for it was
largely due to their work between the years 1900 and 1911 that the ground
was prepared for Funk's harvest.

The relation of rice to this disease was more than a suspicion even in
1898. In 1897 a Dutch chemist, Eijkman, had succeeded in producing in
fowls a similar set of symptoms by feeding them with polished rice alone.
This set of symptoms he called polyneuritis and this term is now commonly
used to signify a beri-beri in experimental animals. Eijkman found that
two or three weeks feeding sufficed to produce these symptoms and it was
he who first showed that the addition of the rice polishings to the diet
was sufficient to relieve the symptoms. Eijkman first thought that the
cortical material contained something necessary to neutralize the effects