234 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



citric acid in lime-juice, for example, may confer a stability on 

 the active principle which is not apparent in the slightly alkaline 

 milk, where, it will be noted, simple sterilisation is sufficient to 

 destroy it. 



The fact that heating the milk destroys the anti-scorbutic 

 vitamine accounts for the appearance of scurvy in infants fed on 

 artificial substitutes for human milk. An interesting case is 

 recorded in the Lancet of 191 1 by Brachi and Carr, where a 

 female infant, one of twins, developed the disease at the age of 

 seven months. For the first six weeks of life the child had been 

 breast fed, but after that had been brought up entirely on the 

 Chelsea Borough Council sterilised milk. As there were no 

 teeth, there was no marked congestion of the gums, but the legs 

 and thighs were characteristically swollen and very painful and 

 tender. The X-rays revealed large sub-periostial swellings 

 situated at the lower ends of both femora. The treatment con- 

 sisted in giving fresh milk, diluted with water at first, with 

 orange juice and raw meat juice. Within a week, the swellings 

 began to subside, and in a fortnight the tenderness had dis- 

 appeared. The child left the hospital a month afterwards 

 completely cured. Cheadle and Poynton in their work on this 

 subject state : " There is nothing in the whole range of medicine 

 —not even excepting the effect of thyroid extract in myxcedema 

 — more striking and remarkable than the immediate and rapid 

 recovery which follows the administration of fresh vegetable 

 material and other fresh elements of food in these cases of 

 infantile scurvy." It may be well to draw attention in passing 

 to the probability that since boiled or sterilised milk often enters 

 largely into the diet, many children suffer, not perhaps from 

 typical scurvy itself, but from slight manifestations of the disease, 

 fortunately arrested, often fortuitously, by a trifling alteration 

 of the diet or by the addition to it of what may even be deemed 

 indigestible fresh foodstuff. 



There appears to be a close connection between beri-beri 

 and scurvy. Feeding hens, doves, ducks, etc., with polished 

 rice causes polyneuritis, whilst dogs and guinea-pigs on a 

 polished rice diet develop not beri-beri but scurvy. Pigs 

 similarly treated suffer from both diseases. It would seem that 

 polished rice is devoid of both the anti-beri-beri and the anti- 

 scurvy vitamines, and that each type of animal, except the pig, 

 is more susceptible to the absence of one than the other, the 



