Christiaan Eijkman

Dutch physician, bacteriologist, professor of physiology and hygiene.

Eijkman won the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Sir Frederick Hopkins for the discovery of thiamine deficiency as the cause of beriberi. His brilliant assistant, the later professor in Animal Physiology and Rector Magnificus of the University of Wageningen Gerrit Grijns (b. 28 May 1865, Leerdam - 11 November 1944, Utrecht) who also contributed to this insight, was passed.

He was the seventh of the ten children of Christiaan Eijkman (b. 25 Nov 1822, Utrecht- 1 Dec 1893, Wageningen), the headmaster of a boarding school and Johanna Alida Pool (13 Dec 1814, Nijmegen - 14 Dec 1898, Amsterdam) who married 13 April 1949. Two children died early, but the others eight became adults. His brother Johann Frederik Eijkman (1851) became a famous chemist.

In 1875 Eijkman studied medicine at the Military Medical School of the University of Amsterdam to become a medical officer for the Netherlands Indies Army. From 1879 to 1881 he assisted the physiologist T. Place. On 13 July 1883 he dissertated cum laude on the thesis ”Over de polarisatie van zenuwen” (On Polarization of the Nerves) in Amsterdam.

On 30-8-1883 he married Aaltje Wigêri van Edema (b. 19 Nov 1859, Wolvega - 8 Jan 1886, Nijehaske). That year they went to Java, later West-Sumatra where he served as a medical officer. After he he contracted malaria he went back to the Netherlands on sick-leave. In 1885 he specialised in bacteriology under Joseph Forster in Amsterdam and Robert Koch in Berlin. In 1886 his wife Aaltje died at age 27.

The same year he went back to the Dutch Indies to study the polyneuropathy disease beriberi. The commission for the investigation of beriberi under the head of Pekelharing and Winkler was established by the Dutch government to combat the disease that took epidemic forms in the eighties of the 19th century.