The history of the medical and scientific debate about the etiology of the disease as it played out between diet theorists and contagionists from 1880 to 1940.

Introduction: Medicine, Power, and the Rhetoric of Empire
The Geography of Affliction: Beriberi in Edo and Tokyo
Putting the Laboratory at the Center
Beriberi: Disease of Imperial Culture
Empire and the Making of a National Disease
The Science of Vitamins and the Construction of Ignorance
The Rice Germ Debate: Total Mobilization and the Science of Vitamins in the 1930s