The Second Most Prescribed Medication Last Year Wasn’t a Drug at All
With agreeable utilization among the disagreeable
In the early 20th century, children in the United Kingdom were experiencing high incidents of a developmental disorder. Rickets, a condition affecting bone growth and strength, was so prevalent it came to be known as “the English Disease.” The King’s College for Women in London, which happened to have male faculty, tasked biochemist and nutritionist Edward Mellanby with figuring out the cause and potential cure for this disease.
In his experiments, Mellanby decided to feed dogs a diet of oatmeal — one which matched that of the Scottish people — who happened to have the highest incidents of rickets in the U.K. As expected, the dogs developed rickets. To cure them, Mellanby used cod liver oil, and sure enough, it worked. But what was it in the oil specifically that healed this disease?
Another professor, Elmer McCollum of Johns Hopkins, would figure that out.
Some in the academic community believed it was vitamin A within the cod liver oil which cured rickets. By oxidizing the cod liver oil, effectively destroying the vitamin A, McCollum tested whether the preparation would work. When it did, he correctly concluded the substance within cod liver oil curing rickets was a new…
