DR HUGH Butt, the Mayo Clinic physician who discovered the role of vitamin K in clotting and developed anti-clotting techniques that paved the way for open-heart surgery and transplants, has died after a fall at his home in Rochester, Minnesota, in the United States. He was 98.
He was a resident at Mayo in the 1930s when he learned that Danish nutritionist Henrik Dam, who received the 1943 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of vitamin K, had shown that chickens deficient in the vitamin were susceptible to internal bleeding.
Butt suspected that an inability to absorb the vitamin properly was at the root of the hemorrhaging and confirmed this in chickens.
Soon after, he was confronted with a jaundiced patient who was bleeding to death internally. He administered vitamin K combined with bile salts to increase absorption and, within an hour, the bleeding had ceased.
It was “the first kind of miracle I had ever seen,” he later recalled.
Tags: 1930s, absorption, bile salts, bleeding to death, chickens, clinic physician, danish, discovery, henrik dam, mayo clinic, medicine, miracle, nobel prize, nutritionist, open heart surgery, physiology, rochester minnesota, transplants, vitamin k
