> In [the 1760s], James Lind, a naval surgeon, conducted a more scientifically rigorous (and personally less risky) experiment by finding twelve sailors who had scurvy already, dividing them into pairs, and giving each pair a different putative elixir—vinegar to one, garlic and mustard to another, oranges and lemons to a third, and so on. Five of the groups showed no improvement, but the pair given oranges and lemons made a swift and total recovery. Amazingly, Lind decided to ignore the significance of the result and doggedly stuck with his personal belief that scurvy was caused by incomple…

> The real breakthrough came in 1912, when Casimir Funk, a Polish biochemist working at the Lister Institute in London, isolated thiamine, or vitamin B1, as it is now more generally known. Realizing it was part of a family of molecules, he combined the terms vital and amines to make the new word vitamines. Although Funk was right about the vital part, it turned out that only some of the vitamines were amines (that is to say, nitrogen-bearing), and so the name was changed to vitamins to make it “less emphatically inaccurate,” in Anthony Smith’s nice phrase.