Study of Rickets in Vienna 1919–1922

THE SUBJECT MArTER of my lecture is now history, but at the time, it represented effects which were entirely unexpected and unexplained.In 1919 there were wide reports of hunger osteomalacia in Vienna and when Dr. Elsie J. Dalyell and I, sponsored by the Lister Institute and the Medical Research Council, went to Vienna in the autumn of 1919 to investigate whether the newly reported effects of vitamin deficiency in animals were applicable to man, we found that the newspaper reports had given only half the truth.Vitamin deficiency was widespread and our message of the cause of its various diseases was received with polite incredulity.But there was one man who believed, Professor K. E. Wenkebach, the well-known heart specialist, Director of the First Medical Clinic of the university and a very influential medical man.He was Dutch and knew of Eijkman's researches in Batavia on beriberi thirty years earlier.'They were wrongly considered only of importance to eaters of polished rice and were pub- lished in a Dutch journal.Professor Wenkebach invited us to his house to give an informal talk on what was known as the "newer knowledge of nutrition" to the chief medical men of Vienna, who had been entirely cut off from all international literature describing work in England and America during the war years.Professor Wenkebach suggested that a special meeting be called of the Gesellschaft der Arzte, to be held in the lecture theatre of his clinic, where we should give a formal account.In the meantime we had succeeded in curing a case of acute infantile scurvy in the University Kinderklinik.There were no oranges in the city, so we laboriously neutralized lemon juice (a very sick infant could not tolerate large amounts of acid) and then reduced it to small bulk in a vacuum and administered it quickly.Further we had treated a case of keratomalacia or corneal ulcer and saved the patient from blindness with butter fat (which we received from the Relief Mission of the Society of Friends).These two dramatic incidents paved the way for our talk to the Gesell- schaft der Arzte.It was based almost entirely on experiments with animals which we and American colleagues had done during the war.The talk was long enough to give *Dame Harriette Chick, D.B.E., D.Sc., who celebrated her one-hundredth birthday on 6 January 1975, was awarded the 1974 Prize Lecture of the British Nutrition Foundation for distinguished research in nutrition.Dame Harriette, a member of the scientific staff of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine from 1905 to 1970, was one of the first to study vitamins.In 1919 she led a small team sent by the Accessory Food Factors Committee of the Medical Research Council to Vienna to investigate whether the diseases affecting the population in that city were the result of vitamin deficiencies in the diet.Dame Harriette chose the classical work of that team on rickets in children and on vitamin D as the subject of her Prize Lecture.