This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to two men, Christiaan Eijkman and Frederick Gowland Hopkins, for discoveries that approached the same idea from opposite directions: Eijkman from a disease he could not explain, and Hopkins from a controlled feeding experiment showing that rats on a diet of pure proteins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals and water stopped growing until a small amount of milk restored the missing piece. Hopkins published the finding in 1912 in the Journal of Physiology and called the missing substances accessory food factors, a name that did not survive.
The name that did survive belongs to neither laureate. Polish biochemist Casimir Funk, working on his own attempt to isolate the anti-beriberi substance from rice polishings, coined the word vitamine in a 1912 paper in the Journal of State Medicine, combining vital and amine on the mistaken assumption that the substance was chemically an amine. The chemistry turned out to be wrong and the word was shortened to vitamin once other such compounds were found not to be amines at all, but Funk's name is the one that stuck in every language that discusses the discovery, even though the Nobel committee's recognition went to Eijkman and Hopkins alone.