This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Christiaan Eijkman did not set out to discover vitamins. He was a Dutch physician stationed in the Dutch East Indies, tasked with finding the infectious agent behind beriberi, a disease that produced weakness, paralysis and, in its worst form, heart failure among people whose diet centered on rice. The clue arrived by accident, in his own laboratory's chicken coop: birds that had been fed leftover polished rice from military rations began developing symptoms resembling beriberi themselves.
Then a new cook, unwilling to feed military rice to civilian birds, switched the chickens back to unpolished rice, and within days the birds recovered. Eijkman methodically ruled out the explanations his training pointed him toward first, blood contamination, respiratory changes, temperature, and was left with a conclusion nobody in infectious disease medicine expected: polished rice was missing something unpolished rice still had. During his 1888 to 1896 directorship of that laboratory, he identified the pattern, decades before anyone would call the missing substance a vitamin, or know it as vitamin B1, thiamine.