A textbook on a subject in which rapid advances are continually being made demands frequent revisions and additions. Beginning with a general discussion, the authors briefly give the history of the discovery of vitamins, define avitaminosis and hypovitaminosis and discuss the relation between vitamins, hormones and minerals. As yet the realm of hypervitaminosis is relatively unexplored.
Each of the known vitamins and some vitamins hypothesized for man are treated individually. The book describes the discovery of vitamins and early work done on them, their chemical structure, their physical and pharmacologic properties, if known, methods of determining their content in food, animals and man, the sources of supply of each, the effects of deficiency as noted experimentally and clinically and the effect of various diseases on their content in the body. The various vitamin-containing preparations on the market are described and compared, and the minimum and optimum dosages are given. Certain