ABSTRACT
The making of the vitamin concept in the first few decades of this century relied heavily on functional ascriptions, centred on the role of specific, but chemically ill-defined nutrients in preventing specific dietary deficiency diseases. In the interwar period, efforts were made increasingly to characterize vitamins in terms of their chemical structure. In the course of these structural pursuits, vitamins were turned from hypothetical explanatory devices into molecules that could be isolated, identified, manipulated and synthesised by scientists. In the process, standard quantitative requirements for individual vitamins were defined, which provided a new rationale for nutritional and medical intervention aimed at preventing and treating diseases. Methods to produce vitamins in increasingly pure form were developed and exploited by industry, not only to manufacture standardized vitamin preparations for clinical use, but to sell vitamin preparations and vitamin-fortified foods to consumers. The promotion of vitamin supplements, in standardized and chemically defined form, served to persuade millions of people to buy these products for the benefit of their health.1
