In the interwar years the scope of the work of the Glaxo department expanded. While dried milk sales were badly affected by the depression – though they recovered in the later 1930s – the department became increasingly aware of and interested in the significant aspects of nutritional research. The identification of accessory food factors – vitamins – attracted the interest of Harry Jephcott, who saw their potential. Mothers, nurses and doctors frequently quizzed Nurse Kennedy and the Glaxo advisory service on the nutritional adequacy of their dried milk in feeding infants. Producing and marketing vitamin products as well as a new, vitamin-enriched proprietary food, Farex, turned Jephcott's and thus the Glaxo department's attention to the developments of the period in the pharmaceutical industry.

Nutritional research and accessory food factors

A series of experiments in nutrition research, comparing vitamin-enriched with vitamin-depleted diets, was conducted in the period between 1873 and 1906. The term ‘vitamine’ was coined in 1912 by Casimir Funk of the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine in London: his paper in the Journal of State Medicine attributed beriberi, scurvy, pellagra (a disease characterised by diarrhoea and dermatitis leading to mental disorder and death), and tentatively rickets to dietary deficiency, and proposed that the substances whose absence caused these illnesses should be called vitamines (because they were vital to life and, so he believed, contained amine).