Report on the Means of Supplying the Poor vnih Food. 35 



perionce, however, shows, that the diet of man must be varied, and 

 must not be restricted to the vegetable kingdom. It was at one time 

 considered that scurvy could only be produced by the use of salt pro- 

 visions. More careful inquiry .has, however, demonstrated, that 

 scurvy may be engendered by restriction to one class of food,- — that 

 even vegetable food possesses both a scorbutic and anti-scorbutic 

 agency, under particular circumstances. Scurvy frequently attacks 

 the Indians in S. America, who live on rice almost alone. It has reigned 

 epidemically in the rice grounds of Lombardy and Piedmont. Scurvy 

 prevailed in an epidemic form in Germany, in 1771 and 1772, yean 

 of scarcity, when many of the inhabitants were obliged to live on 

 legumes, roots, and even the bark of trees; and the same disease 

 aflFocted numbers of the poor people of France, in 1812, 1816, and 

 1817, when even wild plants were employed as food, in consequence 

 of scarcity. In the winter of 1794-95, scurvy not only broke out in 

 the channel fleet, but also appeared on shore ; and cases were admitted 

 into the London hospitals. 



In the lunatic asylum at Moorshedabad, one-third of the inmates 

 are annually affected with scurvy. Their diet consists of rice, split 

 peas, curdled milk, oil, salt, pepper, water, all good of their kind. 



The deleterious effect of a bread and water diet upon the prisoners 

 in the gaols of Bengal and Agra, is sufficiently evinced by the fact, 

 that the mortality among the prisoners was QQ per thousand, in 1833, 

 while among the native troops the mortality was only 10*6 per thou- 

 sand, (Brit. Annals of Med., p. 491.) How far such treatment of 

 men falling into error is congenial with the benevolent doctrines which 

 " desire not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn from 

 his wickedness and live," this is not the proper place to inquire. 



Scurvy, however, is a disease which denotes a bad state of the sys- 

 tem, from want of nourishing food, and a proper admixture of the 

 food which man was destined to exist upon. A want of succulent 

 food appears to produce the same state of system. The famous dis- 

 ease at the Milbank penitentiary, in 1823, — a mixture of scurvy and 

 dysentery, — was attributed to a diet, of which succulent vegetables 

 formed no part, and the quantity and quality of which were not ade- 

 quate to the support of health. Scurvy, therefore, is one of the forms 

 in which starvation, or bad nutriment, which amoimts to the same 

 thing, exhibits itself; and it has been traced to its true cause, after 

 its occurrence for hundreds of years, because it was detected in gaols 

 and mad-houses, and was subjected to careful examination. How 

 many other forms starvation assumes, no one knows. From the 

 Registrar General's Report for England and Wales, in 1839, it 

 appears that 130 persons died of starvation, that is, purely from want 

 of food, or direct starvation, as it may be termed, for it now occupies 

 a distinct head as a disease in the bills of mortality ; but how many 

 persons died by piece-meal starvation, or disease engendered by bad 



