Vitamin C and the common cold but it has halved the frequency of colds in people under heavy short-term physical stress. There is no effect of taking vitamin C in doses up to 8 grams per day after a cold has already begun. Vitamin C was identified in the early part of the twentieth century, and there was much interest in its possible effects on various infections including the common cold. A few controlled trials on the effect of vitamin C on the common cold were carried out already in the 1940s, the earliest of these appears to be a placebo-controlled trial published in 1945. The
Vitamin publicity. In 1912 Polish-born biochemist Casimir Funk, working in London, isolated the same complex of micronutrients and proposed the complex be named "vitamine". It was later to be known as vitamin B (niacin), though he described it as "anti-beri-beri-factor" (which would today be called thiamine or vitamin B). Funk proposed the hypothesis that other diseases, such as rickets, pellagra, coeliac disease, and scurvy could also be cured by vitamins. Max Nierenstein a friend and reader of Biochemistry at Bristol University reportedly suggested the "vitamine" name (from "vital amine"). The name soon became synonymous with Hopkins' "accessory factors", and, by the