DRIED MEAT — WENTWORTH 569 



caused by lack of exercise and by filth, but by March, de Trobriand 

 was convinced that it was due to something lacking in the food. He 

 blamed the "limitation of fare which, because of the absence of fresh 

 vegetables, eggs, fowl, veal, mutton, and even game, had reduced us to 

 a diet that brings scurvy to the soldiers and takes the edge off the 

 appetites of the officers." 26 



Meat may lack the concentrations of vitamin C to bring instant 

 therapeutic response, but by de Trobriand's time commanders in the 

 field knew that it would bring early relief, and when used in advance 

 would prevent the appearance of the disease. A half -century later, 

 Dr. Alfred Hess presented a paper on scurvy before the American 

 Medical Association in New York. 27 He stated that he used fresh 

 lemons, limes, grated oranges, and grated raw vegetables, but on meat 

 alone Stefansson obtained the same results. Both diets required four 

 days for recovery. Furthermore, they were found to be equally quick 

 acting in cases of scurvy when the patients were gloomy in spirit, too 

 weak to stand, and had pain in every joint. 



Another decade was required after de Trobriand to give proper 

 credit to pemmican on these points. A serious outbreak of scurvy 

 took place among the members of the Arctic expedition of Sir George 

 Nares in 1875-76 and a committee was appointed by the British ad- 

 miralty to conduct his court-martial. The most effective witness was 

 Rear Adm. Sir Leopold McClintock, who had been the outstanding 

 personage to emerge from the numerous searches for the lost Sir John 

 Franklin expedition of the late 1840's. 28 He testified that he used lime 

 juice (the standard remedy of that date) on only one expedition, and 

 that whenever he could use fresh meat — and he stated emphatically 

 that he considered the dried meat in pemmican equally as efficient as 

 fresh — he had no trouble with scurvy. 



During World War II some authorities objected to the assumed 

 high percentage of protein in pemmican, and recommended the ad- 

 dition of carbohydrates. Protein requires more water in human 

 metabolism than starches and sugars. In fact the water requirement 

 is more than seven times as great in protein. But starches and sugars 

 cannot rebuild the muscular tissue and human vigor declines, while the 

 energy-releasing foods accumulate uselessly because the human ma- 

 chine is running down. The fat in pemmican is particularly import- 

 ant in this connection for it releases relatively large amounts of water, 



* Ibid., p. 238. 



* 7 Stefansson quotes Hess in Not by bread alone, p. 171. 



58 Report of tbe Committee Appointed by the Lords Commissioners of the 

 Admiralty to Enquire into the Causes of the Outbreak of Scurvy in the Recent 

 Arctic Expedition — presented to both Houses of Parliament — London, 1877. Ad- 

 miral McClintock's testimony was given January 20, 1877, on p. 110 ff., questions 

 on pp. 3248-3399. 



