Christiaan Eijkman

Christiaan Eijkman (1858 to 1930) was a Dutch physician and professor of physiology born in Nijkerk whose demonstration that beriberi is caused by poor diet led to the discovery of the antineuritic vitamin, later identified as thiamine. He trained as a medical officer at the Military Medical School of the University of Amsterdam, served in the Dutch East Indies, and from 1888 to 1896 directed the Medical Laboratory in Batavia, where he noticed that hens fed polished rice developed beriberi like symptoms. He later became a professor at Utrecht, where he also devised a fermentation test for water polluted by faecal bacteria. In 1929 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Frederick Hopkins for the discovery of vitamins.