The Dutch and Indies press of the 1890s is open on Delpher, the national library’s archive, and the beriberi debate can be read in it week by week. What follows is a reading of that debate, in my translation, from the summer of 1896, when a Soerabaja paper announced that Eijkman had found the cure, to the autumn of 1898, when a colonial review said the rice-poison theory should rest in peace.

The cure announced

In August 1896 the Soerabaja Courant reported that Dr C. Eijkman had “some months ago” discovered the means of preventing and curing beriberi. The Indisch Nieuwsblad replied that the honour belonged to a layman, the adjutant-sergeant Van den Driessen, who had said that the cause of beriberi lay in the rice and that the soldiers should be given Java rice of the latest harvest instead of Saigon rice. The Batavia weekly Insulinde went to Eijkman, who was then on leave in Holland, and he agreed to an interview on condition that he could correct the Soerabaja paper’s account. His answer, reprinted in De Locomotief of Semarang on 21 November, is the clearest statement he made of his position before the prisons spoke.

He had not first noticed the chicken disease “some months ago”; he had described it in the laboratory’s report for 1889 and “for seven years, and I may add almost without interruption,” had studied it. It was not true that only foreign rice produced it; every sample of table rice he had tried, “cooked or uncooked,” had done so, including Java rice pounded under his eye from sound grains the day it was fed. He could produce the disease with sago from Ambon, with pearl tapioca and with the starch of the sugar palm. Already in his first paper he had shown that sick birds recovered on unhulled rice, and he had since found that the grain need only keep its inner coat, the silver skin, “in which therefore the salutary constituent must be sought.” He had been trying for about two years to get a trial on men, had asked for the native crew of a warship and been refused, and had settled on the city hospital at Batavia, where the patients had been divided into two halves at the beginning of 1896, one on cooked red rice and one on the ordinary white. After six weeks, when he left, both halves were doing well; after five months, the city physician told him, it was still the same. “I state at the outset that it is by no means claimed by me that the remedy against beri-beri has already been found.” What gave him most courage was Vorderman’s first list of the prisons. Of Van den Driessen: “he has indeed said that the cause of beri-beri lay in the rice feeding, and in doing so imagined that this depended on the variety, the quality of the rice.” For Eijkman “the variety, the quality or the origin matter less. I do not imagine a favourable influence from a particular kind of rice, but from one’s not giving table rice but ‘unpolished’ rice, rice with the silver skin.”

Amsterdam, 3 December 1896

On 3 December the Amsterdam medical circle heard E. van Dieren on “Beri-beri a rice poisoning.” Van Dieren, a doctor who had served in the Indies, had published a book of that title in 1896 and a longer one in 1897, and his thesis was that beriberi stood to rice as ergotism to rye and pellagra to maize: a poison in a cereal, attacking the nervous system, with Eijkman’s chickens as fresh proof. The circle, De Locomotief reported on 5 February 1897, “by no means conceded him all his conclusions.” Reilingh pointed to Vorderman’s results, just printed in the laboratory’s journal. Professor Stokvis paid tribute to the historical method and then to “Mr Eijkman, who does not hesitate to acknowledge the errors in his experimental investigations,” and said that experience became science only when it could be tested by experiment. Spruyt-Landskroon observed that the great resemblance between Asiatic cholera and acute arsenic poisoning proved nothing about the aetiology of cholera, and that a disease found almost only among natives argued against a poisoning and for an infection. De Bruin said the speaker had shown only that diet had a great influence on the disease, not that the pathogenic agent lay in it, and offered infantile scurvy, which followed condensed milk and was probably microbial all the same. Stokvis closed by saying that the remarks of the last two speakers showed exactly the value of Eijkman’s work: how rice did its harm was undecided; that it did was now shown both historically and experimentally. Van Dieren hoped the government would take “thorough measures to improve the food in the prophylaxis and treatment of beri-beri with speed.”

The paper’s own correspondent, van Sandick, who had conducted the Insulinde interview, added a note that is worth the whole debate. Nothing Eijkman had said showed “that Dr Eijkman believes that beri-beri arises from the food and is not an infectious disease. He has, in our opinion, not expressed himself on this at all. He has only communicated that he has found in the silver skin of the rice a remedy against his chicken disease, and he hopes, on account of the analogy of symptoms between that chicken disease and beri-beri, that this silver skin will also be a remedy against beri-beri. How beri-beri arises is left open.”

Soerabaja and the contract

In July 1896 red rice had been introduced on trial in the prison at Soerabaja, in the Pegirian institution and in the city hospital there. On 1 January 1897 new contractors took over the supply. The prison director, Popp, rejected the first delivery as bad and bought white polished rice at the contractor’s expense; the contractor then said he could supply red rice, but only foreign red rice, which was imported from Singapore for horses and, with the dollar low, was cheaper than red rice from the interior. The contract forbade “foreign” rice, by which its drafters had meant polished rice. Samples went to Vorderman, who consulted Roll at the laboratory, and the two advised that the origin was of no account and the rice fit for the trial, “since the grains were wholly in possession of silver skin”; the Director of Justice allowed it. The Soerabaja papers took the episode as proof that the experts had changed their minds, that the trial was meant to show foreign rice was the culprit, and that the government was feeding prisoners horse fodder. Eijkman answered in Insulinde, reprinted in De Locomotief on 6 May 1897. The whole trial rested on one point, the silver skin, “and it is clear that above all it had to be prevented that this was departed from for even a moment. A short interruption would have put the whole success of the trial in the balance.” He asked the papers to understand “that the question at the moment does not turn on” foreign rice, while conceding that the contract’s wording had invited the mistake. The paper’s editor, for his part, insisted in a footnote that white, red and black rice were three different kinds.

The experts disagree

In March 1897 the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad ran a three-part reading of Eijkman’s 1896 paper by H. G. Bartelds, who set out the experiments fairly and ended with a layman’s question that the laboratory had not answered: since the monkeys fed cooked rice for years had not fallen ill and had put on weight, “would this experiment not be of more significance for man than all the other experiments with chickens together?” In July the same paper carried Kessler’s reply to van Dieren in the laboratory’s journal, “Beri-beri NOT a rice poisoning,” and its own summary of the state of the art: “Pekelharing saw in it an infectious disease; Eijkman attributes it to the eating of polished rice on the strength of chicken experiments; van Dieren to a poison; Kessler denies both.” In August and September van Dieren answered Kessler in the Algemeen Handelsblad of Amsterdam and the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad, and in November, in the Handelsblad again, complained that Eijkman had written in the Dutch medical weekly that what van Dieren said of his work “deserves no confidence.” In January 1898 the Handelsblad’s medical columnist mocked van Dieren’s latest book, with its battlefield of capital letters, and the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad reprinted the mockery a month later.

Bran in the soup

On 2 September 1897 the Java-Bode of Batavia reported that the army had begun its own experiment. The first depot battalion at Meester Cornelis, with an establishment of 765 and a strength of about 1,600, through which some 15,000 men had passed in 1894, was being fed dedak, rice bran, boiled in its soup, “by the sick and the healthy participant” alike, every day. The paper worked out that the battalion turned over its men about ten times a year, so that no result could be read from it, and that the soldiers were not eating the soup. “The experiment with dedak in the army is an absurd experiment. Scientific data of any value it cannot yield.” It added the one rule it thought the authorities had missed: “First try it yourself. Not one spoonful, but a portion; not one minute, but days on end.”

Eijkman’s answer

Eijkman’s long paper of 1898 in the Dutch medical weekly, “Beri-beri and food,” is summarised at length in the Indische Gids and from there in the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad of 10 September 1898, and in it he turned on everyone. Van Dieren’s poison theory had “made a fiasco in scientific respect,” and might “rest in peace.” Van Dieren’s claim that Eijkman had said rice feeding had a preponderant influence on beriberi was a mutilated quotation: he had spoken of “the preponderant influence of the nature of the rice feeding (degree of hulling, in other words) on the occurrence or not of beri-beri,” which was merely a description of Vorderman’s findings. The campaign for a richer, meatier ration rested on statistics that would not bear the weight: the Dutch navy’s European sailors had been fed better since 1891 and had more beriberi, not less; the Japanese navy’s improvement had begun in 1883 before Takaki’s change; the Straits prisons had cut their ration in 1887 and 1890 and beriberi had stayed away. And to the people in Holland demanding congresses and measures, “the pilots ashore who have never seen the Indies,” he asked that they “at last be silent and leave the investigators in the Indies quietly to their work. With work one can get there, not with talk.” In the laboratory’s own journal that year he said the one practical thing he was sure of: “The main thing is that the grains are in possession of the silver skin.”

What the whole war never once contained, on any side, was the sentence Grijns would print in 1901: that something was missing. Every party had a poison. Van Dieren’s was in the grain; the Soerabaja papers’ was in Saigon; Kessler had none and wanted an infection; Eijkman’s was made of starch in the crop, with its antidote in the skin. The newspapers argued for two years about where the poison was, and the answer, when it came, was that there was no poison.

Sources

• “Dr. C. Eykman over de Beri-Beri,” De Locomotief, 21 November 1896, from Insulinde. Delpher
• “Beri-Beri in Indische Gevangenissen,” De Locomotief, 5 February 1897: the Amsterdam medical circle of 3 December 1896 and van Sandick’s note. Delpher
• “De Beri-beri en de Wetenschap,” Soerabaijasch Handelsblad, 18, 23 and 24 March 1897, by H. G. Bartelds. 18 March, 23 March, 24 March
• “Beri-Beri,” De Locomotief, 6 May 1897: Eijkman in Insulinde on the Soerabaja contract, and the correspondence from Soerabaja. Delpher
• “Beri-beri GEEN rijstvergiftiging,” Soerabaijasch Handelsblad, 15 July 1897; “Beri-Beri een rijstvergiftiging,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 19 August 1897, and Soerabaijasch Handelsblad, 16 and 18 September 1897; “De Beri-beri-quaestie,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 30 November 1897; “Medische Kroniek: Het beri-beri-debat,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 9 January 1898. 15 July, 19 August, 30 November, 9 January 1898
• “Dedak voor de soldaten,” Java-Bode, 2 September 1897. Delpher
• “De stand van het beri-beri-vraagstuk,” Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, 10 September 1898, from the Indische Gids, on Eijkman’s “Beri-beri en voeding,” Nederlandsch Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, 1898. Delpher
• C. Eijkman, “Nogmaals beri-beri en voeding,” Geneeskundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië 38 (1898), pages 277 to 284: “Hoofdzaak is, dat de korrels in het bezit zijn van het zilvervliesje.” archive.org

All translations from the Dutch are by the author of this piece.