\"First To Formulate Vitamins\" Casimir Funk Hand Signed 5.75X3.25 Card For Sale

Up for sale a VERY RARE!  "First To Formulate Vitamins" Casimir Funk Signed 5.75X3.25 Card. 

ES-1771

Kazimierz February 23, 1884 – November 19, 1967[2]), commonly anglicized as Casimir Funk, was a Polish biochemist, generally credited with being among the first to

formulate (in 1912) the concept of vitamins,[4] which he called "vital

amines" or "vitamines". After reading an article by the

Dutchman Christiaan Eijkman that

indicated that persons who ate brown rice were less vulnerable to beri-beri than those who ate only the fully milled

product, Funk tried to isolate the substance responsible, and he succeeded.

Because that substance contained an amine group,

he called it "vitamine". It was later to be known as vitamin B3 (niacin), though he thought that it would be thiamine (vitamin B1)

and described it as "anti-beri-beri-factor". In 1911 he published his

first paper in English, on dihydroxyphenylalanine. Funk was sure that more than

one substance like Vitamin B1 existed, and in his 1912 article for the Journal

of State Medicine, he proposed the existence of at least four vitamins: one

preventing beriberi (“antiberiberi”); one preventing scurvy (“antiscorbutic”);

one preventing pellagra (“antipellagric”); and one preventing rickets

(“antirachitic”). From there, Funk published a book, The Vitamines,

in 1912, and later that year received a Beit Fellowship to continue his

research. Funk

proposed the hypothesis that other diseases, such as rickets, pellagra, coeliac disease, and scurvy could also be cured by vitamins. Funk

was an early investigator of the problem of pellagra. He suggested that a

change in the method of milling corn was responsible for the outbreak of

pellagra, but no attention was paid to his

article on this subject. The

"e" at the end of "vitamine" was later removed, when it was

realized that vitamins need not be nitrogen-containing amines.

He postulated the existence of other essential nutrients, which became known as

vitamins B1, B2,

C, and D. In 1936 he determined the molecular structure of thiamine, though he was not the first to isolate it. Funk also

conducted research into hormones, diabetes, peptic ulcers, and the biochemistry of cancer. After returning to the United States, in 1940 he

became president of the Funk Foundation for Medical Research. He spent his last

years studying the causes