History of vitamin D

The discovery of vitamin D arose from research into rickets – a bone disease of infancy and early childhood that reached epidemic proportions on the industrial cities of Europe and the United States of America during the industrial revolution.

The first scientific description of a vitamin D-deficiency, namely rickets, was provided in the 17th century by both Dr. Daniel Whistler (1645) and Professor Francis Glisson (1650).

It was not until 1822 that a Polish physician noted that children living in the city of Warsaw were likely to have rickets than children living in the countryside which led him to prescribe sunlight as a cure for the disease.

The major breakthrough in understanding the causative factors of rickets was the development in the period 1910 - 1930 of nutrition as an experimental science and the appreciation of the existence of vitamins.

In 1919 Mellanby discovered the nutritional importance of animal fats for the normal calcification of bones by raising dogs affected with rickets through a special diet and by curing the animals with animal fats.

In 1921 he wrote, "The action of fats in rickets is due to a vitamin or accessory food factor which they contain, probably identical with the fat-soluble vitamin." Furthermore, he established that cod liver oil was an excellent antirachitic agent.

In 1919, Huldschinsky cured four children with severe rickets by exposing by exposing them to the rays of a mercury quartz lamp, thus demonstrating that UV radiation form an artificial source was equally effective as solar radiation.

Shortly thereafter E.V. McCollum and associates observed that by bubbling oxygen through a preparation of the "fat-soluble vitamin" they were able to distinguish between vitamin A (which was inactivated) and vitamin D (which retained activity).

From the work of Mellanby and McCollum, vitamin D became known as an essential nutrient.

In 1923 Goldblatt and Soames clearly identified that when a precursor of vitamin D in the skin (7-dehydrocholesterol) was irradiated with sunlight or ultraviolet light, a substance equivalent to the fat-soluble vitamin was produced. Hess and Weinstock confirmed the dictum that "light equals vitamin D".

The focus of many researchers from 1930 to 1960 was the role of vitamin D in mineral metabolism, i.e. calcium and phosphate absorption and excretion and bone formation and mobilization.

In parallel studies, Steenbock and Black found that rat food which was irradiated with ultra violet light also acquired the property of being antirachitic. However, because of the rapid rise of the science of nutrition -- and the discovery of the families of water-soluble and fat-soluble vitamins -- it rapidly became firmly established that the antirachitic factor was to be classified as a vitamin.

1960’s research demonstrated that vitamin D is precursor of a steroid hormone.
History of vitamin D