13 Facts About Takaki Kanehiro

Baron Takaki Kanehiro was a Japanese naval physician.

Takaki Kanehiro is known for his work on preventing the vitamin deficiency disease beriberi among sailors in the Japanese navy, who had been living mainly on white rice.

Takaki Kanehiro later studied western medical science under British doctor William Willis.

Takaki Kanehiro was sent to Great Britain for medical studies in 1875, and interned at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School now part of King's College London in London.

Takaki Kanehiro knew that beriberi was not common among Western navies.

Takaki Kanehiro noticed that Japanese naval officers, whose diet consisted of various types of vegetables and meat, rarely suffered from beriberi.

In 1883 Takaki Kanehiro learned of a high incidence of beriberi among cadets on a training mission from Japan to Hawaii, via New Zealand and South America that lasted for 9 months.

Takaki Kanehiro made a petition to Emperor Meiji to fund an experiment with an improved diet for the seamen that included more barley, meat, milk, bread and vegetables.

Takaki Kanehiro succeeded, and in 1884, another mission took the same route, but this time only sixteen beriberi cases among 333 seamen were reported.

Takaki Kanehiro's success occurred ten years before Christiaan Eijkman, working in Batavia, advanced his theory that beriberi was caused by a nutritional deficiency, with his later identification of vitamin B1 earning Eijkman the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In 1905, Takaki Kanehiro was ennobled with the title of danshaku under the kazoku peerage system for his contribution of eliminating beriberi from the Imperial Japanese Navy, and awarded the Order of the Rising Sun.

Takaki Kanehiro's school was the first private medical college in Japan, and was the first in Japan to have students dissect human cadavers.

Takaki Kanehiro was posthumously honored by having a peninsula in Antarctica at named "Takaki Kanehiro Promontory" in his honor.