Word: beriberi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...huts called Camp No. 113, in a valley 50 miles from the China border. It was so remote that the Viet Minh did not bother with barbed wire or close guarding. Of 350 French, Senegalese and North Africans in the camp when Leriche arrived, some 200 died of starvation, beriberi, malaria, dysentery. Yet, grotesquely, Camp 113 was proudly regarded by the Reds as a special operation. It was run by a pair of polished, French-speaking Vietnamese who addressed the prisoners as "Mes chers amis...
...tall, gaunt, straight body . . . the eyes flashing in his tired face . . . He was on his toes, and had a grasp of every part of the tactical situation. He seemed to be able to put himself in the place of everybody out there. Near the end, Wainwright was suffering from beriberi. Undernourishment had affected him so badly that he could barely use his right leg. Despite this, dragging himself along and leaning on a cane, he walked along the roads all the time, inspecting the final defenses. He was the only general I have ever seen actually cheered...
...Indians, death seemed to be a laughing matter. They would roar with glee when their best friends came down with beriberi or were snapped out of dugouts by the giant anacondas. Everybody, Indian or white, drank incredible quantities of cachaça, the local cane liquor, ate maggoty rice and dried meat, and sank deeper into debt...
...smile, he would call to some brutish guard: "Come here, you charming little lump of garbage, and buy this perfectly worthless pen." The proceeds always went for food for all prisoners. Day in & day out, the padre conducted an average of three funerals as the men died of dysentery, beriberi, malaria and simple starvation...
...ounce of B1 trickled out at the other end. Williams and the Merck-men tackled the job of synthesis, and in 1936 succeeded in making B1 easily and cheaply from simple organic compounds. Merck went into big-scale production. Result: medicine at last had a weapon to vanquish beriberi...