Abstract

"New Vision for Health and Markets: The International Vitamin Standardization of 1931"

Alma Igra, Columbia University (ai2298@columbia.edu)

1924 was a difficult time to account for things that kill us in their absence. The two prominent frameworks of modern medicine since the 19th century – germ theory and toxicology – focused on dangers that entre the otherwise healthy human body. Vitamin scholars struggled to explain their research. “Disease,” they wrote, “is so generally associated with positive agents - the parasite, the toxin, the materies morb.” Indeed, their study forced them to work against the grain and revise 20th century pathology. In vitamin research, medicine was not about guarding the borders of the human body, but rather about bodies being inherently unhealthy without material exchanges with its environment. This required a reverse bacteriological revulsion.
This paper follows the journey of a new agent on the world scene, the humble vitamin, in order to understand the larger histories of business, standards, and interwar British internationalism. It moves from London to Geneva, then back to London, and later (in cooled tubes) all over Europe. I argue that vitamins were discovered between 1920 and 1931, not just in medicine but also in politics, and that only when vitamins were standardized they were truly discovered. I examine how international vitamin standardization became a British-led initiative, and how it revealed some of the particular tensions in international pharmaceutical trade. This is a story about international economy as much as it is about science. Much like the 19th bacteriological revolution, which shifted markets through sanitation and quarantines, the study of vitamins prompted new market policies. Standardization was a scientific project driven by industrial competitions and vitamin standardization moved particular microscopic nutritious substances from the agricultural food industry to the pharmaceutical industry. Vitamin standardization, as a result, engendered a change in the economic food chain.