In 1884, Takaki observed that beriberi was common among low-ranking crew who were often provided free rice, thus ate little else, but not among crews of Western navies, nor among Japanese officers who consumed a more varied diet. In 1897, Christiaan Eijkman, a Dutch physician and pathologist, demonstrated that beriberi is caused by poor diet, and discovered that feeding unpolished rice (instead of the polished variety) to chickens helped to prevent beriberi. The following year, Sir Frederick Hopkins postulated that some foods contained "accessory factors"—in addition to proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and salt—that were necessary for the functions of the human body. In 1901, Gerrit Grijns, a Dutch physician and assistant to Christiaan Eijkman in the Netherlands, correctly interpreted beriberi as a deficiency syndrome, and between 1910 and 1913, Edward Bright Vedder established that an extract of rice bran is a treatment for beriberi. In 1929, Eijkman and Hopkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries. Etymology
Although according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "beriberi" comes from a Sinhalese phrase meaning "weak, weak" or "I cannot, I cannot", the word being duplicated for emphasis, the origin of the phrase is questionable. It has also been suggested to come from Hindi, Arabic, and a few other languages, with many meanings like "weakness", "sailor", and even "sheep". Such suggested origins were listed by Heinrich Botho Scheube, among others. Edward Vedder wrote in his book Beriberi (1913) that "it is impossible to definitely trace the origin of the word beriberi".
Ulnar dimelia, also referred to simply as mirror hand, is a very rare congenital disorder characterized by the absence of the radial ray, duplication of the ulna, duplication of the carpal, metacarpal, and phalanx bones, and symmetric polydactyly. In some cases surgical amputation is performed to remove the duplicate carpals, metacarpals and phalanges. As of 2015, approximately 70 cases have been recorded in the medical literature. Bone deformity may also accompany nervous and arterial anomalies in some cases due to the duplication of the ulnar nerve, the presence of abnormal arterial arches, the duplication of the  ulnar artery, the shortening of the radial nerve, and the absence of the radial artery. The diagnosis of ulnar dimelia is based on laboratory tests of frontal and sagittal planes in individuals suspected of the condition. There are two types of ulnar dimelia noted in medical journals: Type 1 ulnar dimelia entails one lunate and one trapezoid bone as well as one index finger, while type 2 ulnar dimelia has two lunate and two trapezoid bones as well as two index fingers. The American Society for Surgery of the Hand and the International Federation of Societies for Surgery of the Hand classified ulnar dimelia in the third group of congenital hand deformities in accordance with the characteristics proposed in the Swanson classification (1976). References
Tomaszewski, Ryszard; Bulandra, Andrzej (2015). "Ulnar dimelia-diagnosis and management of a rare congenital anomaly of the upper limb". Journal of Orthopaedics. 12 (Suppl 1): S121–S124. doi:10.1016/j.jor.2015.01.027. PMC 4674541. PMID 26719621. Namdev, Rupesh.