Translations:Vitamin/16/en

In 1881, Russian medical doctor Nikolai Lunin studied the effects of scurvy at the University of Tartu. He fed mice an artificial mixture of all the separate constituents of milk known at that time, namely the proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and salts. The mice that received only the individual constituents died, while the mice fed by milk itself developed normally. He made a conclusion that "a natural food such as milk must therefore contain, besides these known principal ingredients, small quantities of unknown substances essential to life." However, his conclusions were rejected by his advisor, Gustav von Bunge. A similar result by Cornelis Adrianus Pekelharing appeared in Dutch medical journal Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde in 1905, but it was not widely reported.