Christiaan Eijkman

In 1883, before leaving for the Dutch East Indies, Eijkman married Aaltje Wigeri van Edema. She died three years later in 1886. The couple did not have any children.

Later in 1888, he married Bertha Julie Louise van der Kemp. The couple had a son, Pieter Hendrik, born in 1890. He also grew up to become a physician.

After retiring in 1928, Eijkman began to suffer from various illnesses and by 1929 he was so ill that he could not travel to Norway to accept the Nobel Prize in person. He died on 5 November 1930, after a long period of illness in Utrecht.

Christiaan Eijkman was born on 11 August 1858 in the small town of Nijkerk, located in the province of Gelderland in Netherlands. His father, also named Christiaan Eijkman, was the headmaster of a local school. His mother’s name was Johanna Alida Pool.

Christiaan, born seventh of his parents’ eight children, had several gifted brothers. One of them, a chemist, is credited with isolating shikimic acid from the Japanese flower shikimi. Another brother was a noted linguist while a third one was one of the first Dutch roentgenologists.

In 1859, his father was appointed headmaster of a school for advanced elementary education in Zaandam, a large town located in the province of North Holland. It was in this school that Christiaan began his education.

Growing up under the guidance of his father, he passed the school leaving examination in 1875. His ambition was to become a doctor; but the financial condition of the family did not permit that.

Therefore, he enrolled at the Army Medical School under the University of Amsterdam, pledging that he would join the military service on completion of the course. This enabled him to study medicine free of cost. He was a brilliant student, passing his medical examination magna cum laude.

Towards the end of 1883, Christiaan Eijkman was sent to the island of Java, then known as Dutch East Indies, as an Army Surgeon. There he was posted first at Semarang and later at Tjilatjap.

At Java, he was surprised to note that a large number of soldiers, previously healthy, were debilitated by a peculiar disease, which caused peripheral neuropathy, muscle pain and atrophy, and cognitive dysfunction, leading to heart failure and death. Locally the disease was called beriberi.

However before he could do anything, he himself was inflicted with malaria. It was so severe that in November 1885, he was sent back to Netherlands on sick leave, where he decided to train himself in bacteriology, at that time a newly discovered discipline.

He first studied with Josef Förster at Amsterdam. Later, he moved to Berlin to work with Robert Koch, who had by then not only discovered the bacterium responsible for causing tuberculosis, but also the method for growing the bacterium and infecting animals with it.

At that time, it was indeed a revolutionary discovery, mainly because the doctors were clueless about the root cause of diseases like tuberculosis and malaria. With Koch’s discovery they began to see the light.

On 15 January 1888, Christiaan Eijkman became the Director of the medical laboratory, Geneeskundig Laboratorium, holding the position up to 4 March 1896. It was here that he made significant discoveries.

Initially, he tried to infect rabbits and monkeys with microorganisms; but without any success. He therefore concluded that beriberi takes a long time to develop. At the same time, it was not possible to wait too long for the disease to develop.

Therefore, he started looking for animals that would quickly develop the disease and at the same time were inexpensive to keep. He then bought a large number of chickens and kept their cages under the extended roof of the laboratory. He injected a few of them with microorganisms, keeping others as control.

Within a month all the chickens became sick. He then examined them closely through autopsy and histological examination, carefully documenting of their symptoms and disease progression. He found the disease identical to beriberi or polyneuritis endemica perniciosa and so he named it polyneuritis gallinarum.

As regarding the cause of the outbreak, he concluded that the chickens which had been injected had infected the others. To make sure, he bought a few more chickens and kept them in separate cages, but soon enough, they also became sick.