186 Vitamins in Human Nutrition
stance was thenceforth known as B1.1
About this time Dr. Goldberger and his associates of the
United States Public Health Service discovered that vitamin
G, or something associated with it in yeast, eggs, meat, etc.,
would cure pellagra. Pellagra is a first-rank scourge of the
poorly nourished Southern share-croppers who dine the
year around on little besides corn meal, salt pork, molasses,
and coffee. A similar disease, called black-tongue, occurs
in dogs, and it, too, was found to be cured by G-Containing
foods. Further complications developed when it was found
that substances associated with vitamin G, but apparently
not identical with the pellagra-preventing substance, pro-
tected rats and chicks from skin diseases. To make a long
story short, it eventually developed that vitamin G as orig-
inally conceived was in reality a whole packet of vitamins,
as full of separate entities as a roach’s egg case; between
1928 and 1939 new vitamins and “factors” have been pop-
ping off from the vitamin G complex like fleas from a dead
dog. The principal growth-promoting factor for rats, still
sometimes called B2 or G, turned out to be a yellow dye of
a group called flavines; it has now been christened by the
chemical name “riboflavine.” The constituent which pro-
tects man from pellagra and dogs from black-tongue turned
out to be an old familiar chemical, nicotinic acid, which
Funk had found associated with vitamin B1 in rice polishings
twenty-seven years ago. The skin-protector for rats, called
Bβ (part of what has been called vitamin H), has recently
been obtained in pure crystalline form, and its chemical
identity determined. It is probably also needed by human
beings; injection of it into persons suffering from deficiency
of the vitamin G complex, and manifesting great weakness,
'“F” and “G” were proposed for Bi and Bsin America, but “F” had already-
been tentatively assigned to a fatty acid found to be necessary for the nutri-
tion of rats. Its use for Bi would only have caused confusion.