English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

The purpose of this article is to commemorate the death of Willem-Karel Dicke 31 years ago and his first publication on gluten free diet in 1941 (Fig 1). Dicke, born 1905 in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, became the medical director ofthe Juliana Children's Hospital in The Hague at the age of 31. JW Stoop, one of his disciples, wrote about him 'Dicke was an outstanding clinician, scientist and manager with exceptional personal qualities. His intuition, subtle approach, analytical capacities and broad cinical knowledge made him a brilliant clinician'.' We will provide evidence that these qualities and critical observations led him to the conclusion that wheat products contained the factor responsible for the severe clinical symptoms of coeliac disease, at that time also called Gee-Herter's disease, long before his thesis in 1950. In the late '20s and early '30s it was generally agreed that the two main treatment principles in coeliac disease were rest and diet. The most important study in this period was published in 1924 when Sidney Haas2 described his treatment of coeliac disease. He reported 10 cases, of whom he claimed that the eight treated by a banana diet were clinically cured whereas the two untreated had died. From that time there is hardly any form of diet that has not been recommended, such as carbohydrate diet (fruit, puree of potatoes or tomatoes), beef steak cure, milk diet (2-2 5 1/day). Even as early as 1887, however, in the former Dutch East Indies (at present Indonesia), VandeBurg advised a straight fruit diet. These principles of dietary treatment were frequently discussed during the meetings of paediatricians at that time. Visiting such a meeting in 1932 Dicke's attention was directed to a case report presented by Stheeman3 concerning relapses of diarrhoea after the consumption of bread and rusks; according to the testimony of one patient. How do we know that Dicke was convinced of the beneficial effect of wheat free diet even before 1940? From the testimony of Dicke's wife in 1991, we learned that already between 1934 and 1936 he had started his experiments with wheat free diets. Also from Booth's conversation with Dicke it can be concluded that Dicke knew long before World War II that wheat products contained the offending agent; 'It was a young mother's statement of her coeliac child's rash improving rapidly if she removed bread from the diet, that alerted his interest, when he was a paediatrician in The Hague in 1936.'4 At the end of World War II, during the 1944/45 'Winter of starvation', the delivery of normal food such as bread to Figure 1: Photograph ofDicke in his time as Director ofthe Wilhelmina Children's Hospital, Utrecht.

Pioneer in the gluten free diet: Willem-Karel Dicke 1905-1962, over 50 years of gluten free diet.