Axel Holst

Who was Axel Holst?

Axel Holst was a Norwegian professor of hygiene and bacteriology at the University of Oslo, known for his contributions to beriberi and scurvy.

Holst gained his medical degree in 1884 and gained his doctors degree in 1892 involving the bacterium streptococcus, both at the Royal Frederick University. He was a professor of hygiene and bacteriology until his retirement in 1930.

Along with Theodor Frolich, a pediatrician, Holst suspected a nutritional deficiency for scurvy in the Norwegian fishing fleet, then called "shipboard beriberi," and thought to be a variant of beri-beri.

Holst and Frølich established an animal model that allowed systematic study of factors that led to the ship-related dietary disease, as well as the preventive value of different substances. Substituting guinea pigs for pigeons as the experimental animal for these studies was a lucky coincidence, as the guinea pig was later shown to be among the very few mammals capable of showing scurvy-like symptoms, while pigeons, as seed-eating birds, were later shown to make their own vitamin C in the liver, and could not develop scurvy.