56 BIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS 



During the necessary cooking which follows the 

 germination a good deal of the anti-scorbutic value is 

 lost. The loss is minimized if the cooking is made 

 as short as possible and if the dhal is steamed, not 

 boiled. If it cannot be steamed it should be boiled 

 in the least possible amount of water, and the water 

 consumed as soup or stew. If these precautions are 

 observed, it is believed that scurvy can be prevented 

 among any Indian troops receiving the dhal ration. 



The Eastern theatres of war are not the only field 

 of the deficiency diseases. We do not know how 

 near our prisoners of war in Germany may have been 

 to scurvy, but a word of warning should be uttered to 

 anyone who thinks of helping them in that respect by 

 sending them dried vegetables. Articles have ap- 

 peared in the papers urging that by drying cabbages 

 it is possible to send in a match-box all the virtue of 

 the fresh leaf. It is not possible to do so. 



Scurvy broke out in the American Civil War and 

 in the Austrian army in Hungary in 1720, and in 

 both cases dried vegetables were tried and failed com- 

 pletely. Kramer, a surgeon to the Austrian army in 

 the above campaign, after trying unsuccessfully many 

 kinds of dried herbs, wrote: ''Scurvy is the most 

 loathsome disease in nature, for which no cure is to 

 be found in your medicine chests no, not in the 

 best-furnished apothecary's shop. Pharmacy gives 

 no relief, surgery as little. But if you can get green 

 vegetables, if you can prepare a sufficient quantity 

 of fresh, precious, anti-scorbutic juices, if you have 

 oranges, lemons, or citrons, you will without other 

 assistance cure this dreadful evil." So that even then 

 he knew the importance of freshness, but nowadays 

 we seem almost to have forgotten it. 



At the end of the spring of 1917 there were even 

 cases of scurvy in some of the northern towns of Eng- 



