594 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



critic as superstition and by a friendly one would be given some 

 other name with the same meaning.* 



Briefly reviewed, the situation is this: It had been believed 

 for more than a century that lime juice is a specific against scurvy. 

 But every polar expedition has been outfitted with lime juice and 

 nearly all of them had scurvy. Lime juice has been administered in 

 large quantities to those who have had scurvy and many of them 

 have died. The blame was always laid on the poor quality of the 

 lime juice, its deficiency in acid content and the like. It did not 

 occur to any one that while the effect of lime juice on scurvy is 

 positive and rapid if it is freshly bottled, juice several years old 

 has no appreciable preventive or curative value. Something has 

 been made, and rightly, of the fact that lemon juice is better than 

 lime juice, but the central fact is that either of them or any anti- 

 scorbutic whatever loses its value, rapidly or slowly, with storage. 



In popular stories dramatic cures of scurvy are often made with 

 raw potatoes or raw onions. In fact, a raw potato is one of the 

 regular stage properties of the novelist and dramatist of the far 

 North. But they emphasize the potato where they ought to empha- 

 size the eating of it raw. Fresh vegetables if raw have marked 

 antiscorbutic value, but this is lessened or destroyed by either 

 cooking or storage, and especially by a combination of the two. 

 Entirely raw fresh milk is an antiscorbutic but pasteurized milk 

 has either little antiscorbutic value or none. There are probably 

 few foods which do not have antiscorbutic value when raw, whether 

 they are vegetable or animal, fish, flesh or fowl. 



That is the secret of preventing and curing scurvy. Every 

 one of the food items left by Captain Bernier at Winter Harbor, 

 although in apparently perfect condition, was devoid of antiscor- 

 butic qualities. These would all have to be supplied by ovibos or 

 caribou meat, eaten not necessarily raw but imderdone. 



The history of the winter in Melville Island is so complicated 



that it must in general be omitted. Our plans were overambitious. 



The summer had gone so well that we laid out too big a program 



for the winter. It seemed, too, that everything that could possibly 



go wrong did go wrong and that every chance was decided against 



us. Bad weather always struck the traveling parties at critical 



places where losing the trail meant getting entangled in mountains 



* See The Journal of the American Medical Association, Nov. 23, 1918, 

 Vol. 71, pp. 1715-1718, "Observations on Three Cases of Scurvy," by Vilhjal- 

 mur Stefansson; and Medical Review of Reviews, May, 1918, "Original Ob- 

 servations on Scurvy," by Vilhjalmur Stefansson. 



