Christiaan Eijkman Biography

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World of Anatomy and Physiology on Christiaan Eijkman

Christiaan Eijkman was a pioneer in the study of diseases that result from deficiencies in a patient's diet. His major contribution was the discovery that the lack of some vital substance in food caused a disease in chickens similar to beriberi in man. For this work, which helped lead to the concept of vitamins, he received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1929.

Eijkman was born in Nijkerk, Netherlands. He was the seventh child of a schoolmaster father, also named Christiaan Eijkman, and Johanna Alida Pool Eijkman. Theirs was a family of academically gifted sons whose professional careers would encompass the fields of chemistry, linguistics, and radiology. Soon after Eijkman's birth, the family moved to Zaandam, where he received his early education. In 1875, he began training as a military medical officer at the University of Amsterdam. There, his own ability quickly made itself apparent; he received a medical degree with high honors in 1883.

That same year, Eijkman was dispatched by the army to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where he served on the islands of Java and Sumatra until a severe case of malaria forced him to return home in 1885. This proved to be a blessing in disguise, however, for Eijkman used his recuperation time to study the new science of bacteriology under one of the field's founders, Robert Koch, in Berlin. A year later, Eijkman was strong enough to return to the East Indies as part of a Dutch government mission to investigate the disease beriberi. He owed his spot on the research team to personal contacts he had made while working in Koch's laboratory.

The name beriberi comes from the Sinhalese word for "extreme weakness." The disease, characterized by impairment of the nerves, heart, and digestive system, can cause such symptoms as paralysis, numbness, swelling, and difficulty breathing. At the time, the illness was spreading rapidly in Asia, and many European doctors were convinced that the epidemic was bacterial in origin. Eijkman, too, erroneously believed that his search for the source of beriberi would ultimately lead to a microorganism.

In 1888, Eijkman was appointed head of the Javanese Medical School and director of a bacteriological laboratory in Batavia (now Djakarta), where he made a chance observation that would change the course of medicine. An illness, very much like beriberi, suddenly broke out among the laboratory chickens, then just as mysteriously went away. Eijkman learned that an attendant had, for a short time, been feeding the birds cooked white rice from the hospital kitchen. The disappearance of the birds' symptoms coincided with the arrival of a new cook, who refused to allow hospital rice to be used for this purpose. Eijkman soon found that he could produce the disease at will by feeding the chickens hulled and polished rice, and he could just as readily cure it with a diet of whole rice. Eijkman's observations were the starting point for a line of inquiry that led others to an understanding of and treatment for beriberi. Later researchers traced the disease to a lack of thiamine (vitamin B1), a vitamin found in the hulls of unpolished rice. Ironically, Eijkman failed to grasp the true meaning of his findings. He hypothesized that the rice hulls contained a substance that neutralized a toxin carried in or produced by the rice grains. Nevertheless, Eijkman had shown that not every illness could be explained by the then-revolutionary germ theory of disease, and it is for this achievement that he is primarily remembered today.

Eijkman's other important work in the Dutch East Indies was his study of the physiology of people living in the region. He disproved many widely held notions about the effects of tropical life on Europeans, which in the past had led to several unnecessary precautions. For example, he demonstrated that expected differences in metabolism, respiration, perspiration, and temperature regulation between Europeans and natives of the tropics did not, in fact, exist. In 1896, Eijkman once again returned to the Netherlands on sick leave. Two years later, he assumed the post of professor of public health and forensic medicine at the University of Utrecht, where he conducted fermentation tests by examining water for signs of bacterial pollution produced by human and animal defecation. As a lecturer, Eijkman was known for his clear demonstrations, perhaps the result of decades of hands-on experience in the lab.

Eijkman did not confine his interests to the university, however. He was actively involved in such issues as the public water supply, housing, school hygiene, and physical education. As a member of his nation's Health Council and Health Commission, he fought against alcoholism and tuberculosis. In recognition of Eijkman's many contributions to society, the Dutch government conferred several orders of knighthood upon him. He was also made a member of the Netherlands' Royal Academy of Sciences in 1907. But the 1929 Nobel Prize, which he shared with Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins of Great Britain, the discoverer of growth-stimulating vitamins, was his crowning honor. Sadly, though, the seventy-one-year-old Eijkman, who had retired a year earlier, was by this time too sick to travel to Stockholm to receive his prize in person.

Eijkman's first wife died in 1886, soon after his initial return from the East Indies, and just three years after their marriage. Eijkman subsequently remarried 1888, in Batavia. Their son grew to become a physician. Eijkman himself died on November 5, 1930, in Utrecht, Netherlands, after a protracted illness.