Abstract
The year 2022 will feature in history books for a number of reasons; but in the world of nutrition, it marks the Centenary of the landmark investigation by Dame Harriette Chick and her co-workers. Exactly 100 years ago, working with malnourished children in a clinic in Vienna shortly after the First World War, they showed that rickets in children in Austria could be prevented or cured by cod liver oil supplementation. This cod liver oil was subsequently recognised as a particularly rich source of vitamin D (Chick et al., 1922).
A century later, vitamin D continues to be a specific hot topic as evidenced by the number of papers published in recent years in Nutrition Bulletin (Allen et al., 2014; Buttriss & Lanham-New, 2020; Clark et al., 2021; Gibson-Moore, 2021; Guo et al., 2019; Hengist et al., 2019; Lanham-New et al., 2022; Mendes et al., 2018; Smith & Hart, 2017; Spiro & Buttriss, 2014; Tripkovic, 2013; Tripkovic et al., 2017; Wilson-Barnes et al., 2020). These papers have been brought together in a specially curated Virtual Issue [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1467-3010.Vitamin-D-Centenary].
Dame Harriette Chick was awarded the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) Prize in 1974 for her contribution to nutrition research. By then already a Centenarian, she chose her ground-breaking research on vitamin D as the theme for her BNF Annual Lecture (Chick, 1976), in which she summarised her work in Vienna, Austria in 1919–1922, presenting the chemical, clinical and sociological aspects of her story. Dame Harriette worked at the Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine, London, United Kingdom from 1905 to 1970, and she and colleagues were sent to Vienna by the Accessory Food Factor Committee of the Medical Research Council to investigate whether the diseases affecting the population were the result of vitamin deficiencies (Figure 1).