164 



THE CELL AND PROTOPLASM 



of a water-soluble vitamin (because any- 

 excess is easily excreted). 



To come back to our patient, we were 

 told that the vitamin acted only if there 

 were a lack of it, but that there was no 

 lack. In spite of this, the vitamin helped. 

 It is evident that something was wrong 

 about our basic concepts, and we must find 

 the mistake. I think this can be done if 

 we watch our vitaminologist once more but 

 watch him more carefully. He said his 

 guinea pigs had no scurvy; tl^e^efore they 

 were healthy. Here, I think, is the error. 

 Does "no-scurvy" mean "healthy"? Can 

 we divide the world into scurvy and no- 

 scurvy? How does he know that his ani- 

 mals were healthy? Just because they had 

 no scurvy? Do you necessarily call it 

 health if you sit in a protected cage, as 

 these animals did, and have no scurvy? 

 But what then is health ? Is it the same as 

 no-scurvy? Certainly not. Health, full 

 health is a condition of the body in which 

 all functions work at their best. To find 

 out about this we should not allow our ani- 

 mals to sit in a protected cage, but should 

 subject them to all sorts of strain and de- 

 termine the level of vitamin intake at 

 which they do best. 



To be brief, there are reasons to believe 

 that there is a wide zone between full 

 health and scurvy. From the fact that an 

 animal does not show the gross lesions of 

 scurvy we cannot conclude that it is op- 

 timally provided with vitamin C. Between 

 scurvy or any avitaminosis and health 

 there is a wide range of hypovitaminosis, 

 which may show no clinical symptom but 

 which acts all the same as a latent patho- 

 genic factor; and if it associates with an- 

 other pathogenic factor, like alcoholic in- 

 toxication, the two together may lead to a 

 manifest disease. How far we will be able 

 to benefit our man with the application of 

 vitamins depends on the part played by the 

 vitamin in the pathogenesis, and how far 

 the changes are reversible. To repeat: vi- 

 tamins are basic constituents of the cell. 

 If there is not enough of them the cell can- 

 not work at its best and might be unable to 

 resist pathogenic factors which under opti- 



mal conditions would have been resisted. 

 In this way vitamins might be involved in 

 the pathogenesis of any disease; this gives 

 us hope that vitamins, if properly under- 

 stood, will contribute to the reduction of 

 human suffering to an unexpected degree. 

 They have done so in the past; they might 

 do still better in the future. 



I will conclude this lecture on a philo- 

 sophic note. What does all this talk about 

 vitamins, health, and disease really mean? 

 Let us ask a monkey what vitamins mean 

 for him. The only problem is which mon- 

 key we should ask, the monkey in the zoo 

 or the monkey in the jungle. For the 

 monkey in the zoo vitamins mean very 

 much. I am told that monkeys in the Lon- 

 don Zoo must have ultraviolet irradiation, 

 that is, vitamin D, and that the guard must 

 see to it that they have plenty of vitamin 

 C. To the monkey in the jungle vitamins 

 mean nothing. There are plenty; there is 

 no need to think of them; and these vita- 

 mins go through his body with his food. 

 In the form of food and air the jungle goes 

 through the body of our monkey as the 

 monkey goes through the jungle. I mean 

 that the monkey, some day, dies and is 

 eaten by the lion; the lion dies and a tree 

 grows out of it; a new monkey eats the 

 leaves, and so forth, and all the material 

 is in constant circulation. In fact, indi- 

 vidual life means very little in the jungle. 

 The whole bound nitrogen of the jungle is 

 present in living form, now a rabbit, then 

 a lion, a cow, a tree, or a monkey. The 

 whole jungle is one big organism and health 

 in the jungle means a perfect adaptation 

 to this organism. Part of this adaptation 

 is that the body does not make certain sub- 

 stances, like vitamins. But if you sud- 

 denly take our monkey out of this big or- 

 ganism, the jungle, to which he is perfectly 

 adapted, put him on the pavement of a 

 foggy big city, and give him food for which 

 he is not made, because it does not contain 

 all those substances which went constantly 

 through his body in relatively large quanti- 

 ties during millions of years, then our 

 monkey will fail, and become ill. His doc- 

 tor will call his failure by different Latin 



