Wilfrid and Evan Shute: The Vitamin E Doctors of London, Ontario

Evan Shute (1905–1978), an obstetrician, and his younger brother Wilfrid Shute (1907–1982), a physician who treated heart patients and is usually described as a cardiologist, grew up on a farm on Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula and built their life’s work in London, Ontario. In June 1946 Evan and their colleague Dr. A. Vogelsang published a short letter in the journal Nature on vitamin E in coronary heart disease, and that same year Time magazine reported the Shute group’s claim that large doses of the vitamin relieved four common kinds of heart disease. For the next three decades the brothers treated patients, wrote books and ran their own clinic and journal on that idea.

Their vitamin E did not begin with the heart. It began with wheat germ oil — the pressed oil of the wheat kernel’s embryo, the richest common food source of the vitamin — which Evan was using in the 1930s for women threatened with miscarriage. This hub gathers four deep-dive articles on their lives, their 1946 claims, the natural source behind their work and the research that came after them, presented as the Shutes and their contemporaries stated it. The professional reaction of their own time appears as dated events, and the later trials are described neutrally on their own page.

Table of Contents

  1. Deep-Dive Articles
  2. 1. Who Were the Shute Brothers?
  3. 2. The 1946 Heart Claims on One Page
  4. 3. The Natural Source: Wheat Germ Oil
  5. 4. Circulation, Burns and Wounds
  6. 5. Timeline at a Glance
  7. 6. Later Research and Significance
  8. Key Research Papers
  9. Connections

Deep-Dive Articles

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Wilfrid and Evan Shute: Life and Times

From a farm near Lion’s Head to the University of Toronto, Evan’s obstetric training in Chicago, the Shute Foundation at 10 Grand Avenue in 1948, their books, and the Institute’s closing in 2010.

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Vitamin E and the Heart: The Shutes’ 1946 Claims

The first patients, the purpura experiments in dogs, the Nature letter of 8 June 1946, the four kinds of heart disease and the brothers’ claims for veins, gangrene, burns and wounds, as they stated them.

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Wheat Germ Oil and Alpha-Tocopherol: The Natural Source Behind the Shutes’ Work

Evans and Bishop’s 1922 “factor X”, wheat germ oil in the treatment of miscarriage, Evan’s oestrogen theory, the move to purified alpha-tocopherol, and the brothers’ explanation of how the vitamin worked.

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After the Shutes: Vitamin E Trials and Legacy

The controlled angina studies of the 1970s, the 1993 Harvard cohorts, CHAOS, HOPE and the large trials that followed, the advocates’ argument about dose, and the brothers’ place in orthomolecular medicine.

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1. Who Were the Shute Brothers?

According to The Canadian Who’s Who of 1972, Evan Vere Shute was born on 21 October 1905 near Lion’s Head on the Bruce Peninsula, and Wilfrid Eugene Shute on 21 October 1907 at Berkeley, Ontario, to Richard James and Elizabeth Jane Shute. A third brother, Wallace, also became a physician. Both brothers studied at the University of Toronto: Evan took his medical degree in 1927, and Wilfrid, a university wrestling champion and the official photographer of Hart House Theatre, took his in 1933.

Evan trained in obstetrics under Dr. Joseph B. De Lee at the Chicago Lying-In Hospital from 1929 to 1933, then settled in London, Ontario, as a specialist and as Research Assistant in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Western Ontario. Wilfrid’s Who’s Who entry records that he worked with his brother on the clinical investigation of vitamin E from 1937. In 1948 the brothers founded the Shute Foundation for Medical Research and the clinic that became the Shute Institute, in an 1882 house at 10 Grand Avenue, London; from 1949 the Institute published its own journal, The Summary. Outside medicine Evan wrote poetry and children’s books under the pen name Vere Jameson, and Wilfrid became, in the words of Who’s Who, “Canada’s leading breeder of Doberman Pinschers”. The full story is told on Life and Times.

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2. The 1946 Heart Claims on One Page

As Time magazine told the story in 1946, Evan’s interest in vitamin E had begun thirteen years earlier, and his first heart patient was a man from his own church who took cold-pressed wheat germ oil for heart pain and had relief for about three months. A medical student, Floyd Skelton, working at the University of Western Ontario on a $150 grant, found that dogs given large doses of vitamin E were protected from haemorrhages; the work appeared in Science in 1946 as “Antipurpuric action of alpha-tocopherol”. Dr. Vogelsang then gave vitamin E to a 68-year-old pensioner with hypertensive heart disease and haemorrhages who, Time reported, was within a week “out of bed, bustling around the hospital ward”.

The doses the Shutes described were adjusted to each patient and are reported on the deep-dive page as history only. The case histories, the Nature letter and the reaction of the Ontario medical profession in 1946–1953 are told on Vitamin E and the Heart.

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3. The Natural Source: Wheat Germ Oil

Vitamin E was discovered in 1922, when Herbert Evans and Katharine Bishop reported in Science an unrecognised dietary factor that rats needed in order to carry their young to term. The name later given to it, tocopherol, comes from the Greek for “to bring forth offspring”. Wheat germ was the classic source, and by the early 1930s the Danish physician Vogt-Møller was treating women who had repeatedly miscarried with wheat germ and wheat germ oil.

In London, according to Maclean’s, a Victoria Hospital doctor, Earl Watson, prepared wheat germ oil and passed it to obstetricians, Evan among them. Evan’s papers of 1935–1942 describe a serum test he linked to vitamin E deficiency, the treatment of abruptio placentae (early separation of the placenta) with wheat germ oil, and vitamin E in habitual miscarriage. Hutton reported that Evan concluded an excess of the hormone oestrogen lay behind many miscarriages, and that vitamin E appeared to neutralise it. Over the following years the brothers moved from the food oil to purified alpha-tocopherol, the form the body keeps most of. Their explanation of how it worked — that it reduced the amount of oxygen tissues needed, helped new collateral vessels form around a blockage and might help to dissolve clots — is set out, with the modern biochemistry of the vitamin, on Wheat Germ Oil and Alpha-Tocopherol. The food itself has its own page, Wheat Germ Oil.

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4. Circulation, Burns and Wounds

The brothers did not limit their claims to the heart. Their indexed papers report alpha-tocopherol in peripheral thrombosis (American Journal of Surgery, 1952, Evan and Wilfrid), in small areas of gangrene (Canadian Medical Association Journal, 1957, with S. Tolgyes) and in chronic phlebitis and the post-phlebitic syndrome (1959). Hutton’s 1953 article listed further conditions the Shutes and others claimed vitamin E helped: burns, wounds, radiation damage, ulceration, Buerger’s disease, diabetic complications, nephritis, eye diseases and shock after surgery.

Later summaries of their books, such as Andrew Saul’s 2003 review in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, describe the Shutes’ view that vitamin E applied to burns, cuts and surgical incisions reduced inflammation and scarring. Evan returned to the subject in a 1967 letter to the Canadian Medical Association Journal titled “Treatment of burns”. These claims are described in detail on Vitamin E and the Heart.

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5. Timeline at a Glance

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6. Later Research and Significance

Vitamin E and the heart went on being tested long after the brothers stopped writing. In a randomised double-blind trial published in 1974, T. W. Anderson gave 40 patients with angina either 3,200 IU of vitamin E a day or a placebo for nine weeks and reported no statistically convincing benefit, while noting that a small effect could not be ruled out. Gillilan and colleagues reported no change in exercise capacity or angina in a 1977 crossover study at 1,600 IU a day. Interest revived in the 1990s with the antioxidant theory of heart disease and two large Harvard cohort studies, and then came large randomised trials. HOPE, organised from Hamilton, Ontario, gave 400 IU of natural-source vitamin E for an average of 4.5 years to 9,541 high-risk patients and reported no effect on heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular death.

The Shutes’ supporters argue that none of these trials tested the brothers’ own individually adjusted protocol. Linus Pauling, quoted in later accounts, compared the brothers’ conviction about vitamin E with his own about vitamin C, and the orthomolecular movement inducted both Shutes into its Hall of Fame in 2004. Each study, with its design, dose and result, is described on After the Shutes: Vitamin E Trials and Legacy; the vitamin itself is covered on Vitamin E.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Evans HM, Bishop KS. On the existence of a hitherto unrecognized dietary factor essential for reproduction. Science. 1922;56(1458):650-1. PubMed PMID: 17838496
  2. Shute E. The early diagnosis of abruptio placentae and its treatment with wheat germ oil. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. 1937;33(3):429-436. DOI: 10.1016/s0002-9378(37)90209-6
  3. Skelton F, Shute E, Skinner HG, Waud RA. Antipurpuric action of a-tocopherol (vitamin E). Science. 1946;103(2687):762. PubMed PMID: 17836459
  4. Vogelsang A, Shute EV. Effect of vitamin E in coronary heart disease. Nature. 1946;157:772. PubMed PMID: 21064771
  5. Vogelsang A, Shute E, Shute W. Vitamin E in heart disease. Med World (New York). 1947;160(1):21-6. PubMed PMID: 20281936
  6. Shute WE, Shute EV, Vogelsang A. The physiological and biochemical basis for the use of vitamin E in cardiovascular disease. Ann Intern Med. 1949;30(5):1004-8. PubMed PMID: 18126739
  7. Shute E, Shute W. Peripheral thrombosis treated with alpha tocopherol (vitamin E). Am J Surg. 1952;84(2):187-91. PubMed PMID: 14952638
  8. Tolgyes S, Shute E. Alpha tocopherol in the management of small areas of gangrene. Can Med Assoc J. 1957;76(9):730-8. PubMed PMID: 13426912
  9. Anderson TW. Vitamin E in angina pectoris. Can Med Assoc J. 1974;110(4):401-6. PubMed PMID: 4204790
  10. Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation Study Investigators, Yusuf S, Dagenais G, Pogue J, Bosch J, Sleight P. Vitamin E supplementation and cardiovascular events in high-risk patients. N Engl J Med. 2000;342(3):154-60. PubMed PMID: 10639540
  11. Niki E, Traber MG. A history of vitamin E. Ann Nutr Metab. 2012;61(3):207-12. PubMed PMID: 23183290

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. PubMed: papers by Evan V. Shute
  2. PubMed: papers by Wilfrid E. Shute
  3. PubMed: vitamin E and angina pectoris
  4. PubMed: history of tocopherol

Further Reading

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Connections

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