Thirteen vitamins—named from a wrong "vital amine"
Casimir Funk coined “vitamine” in 1912 for a supposed vital amine that fought beriberi; by 1920 Jack Drummond dropped the final e once researchers saw not all were amines. Major health bodies now list thirteen vitamins. Every one was discovered between 1910 and 1948, after centuries of deficiency diseases at sea and ashore.
Vitamins are organic micronutrients—or clusters of related vitamers—needed in small amounts for metabolism that the body cannot make enough of on its own. Vitamin C counts as a vitamin only in species that cannot synthesize it. Vitamin E alone has eight vitamers. Biochemically they diverge: A steers cell growth, D acts hormone-like on mineral metabolism, B vitamins serve as coenzymes, and C and E work as antioxidants. Both shortage and excess can harm, though water-soluble vitamins are harder to overdose.
Long before chemistry, Egyptians fed liver for night blindness—now linked to vitamin A lack. James Lind showed citrus prevented scurvy in 1747; the Royal Navy’s lemon-and-lime policy followed his 1753 treatise, though weaker West Indian limes later left Arctic crews vulnerable. In 1884 Takaki Kanehiro cut Japanese navy beriberi by swapping white-rice diets for mixed rations, yet blamed protein. Christiaan Eijkman’s unpolished-rice chicken experiments and Frederick Hopkins’s “accessory factors” framed the idea that diet holds invisible essentials. Umetaro Suzuki isolated a rice-bran complex in 1910; Funk independently named a similar fraction vitamine.
Commercial yeast-extract B complex and semi-synthetic C arrived from 1935; the 1950s mass-marketed multivitamins, and governments fortified staples such as flour and milk. Pregnancy folic acid advice reduced neural-tube defect risk. Nobel prizes stacked up—from Windaus’s sterols (1928) through Eijkman and Hopkins (1929), Szent-Györgyi’s vitamin C (1937), and work on A, B2, B6, K, and B12. Marketers sold “bottled sunshine” and yeast cakes; when flour was enriched with nicotinic acid in 1942, the press cried “Tobacco in Your Bread,” so the AMA backed the names niacin and niacinamide to distance the vitamin from nicotine.
Source: Vitamin
