54 PHYSIOLOGY AND NATIONAL NEEDS 



The remedy — fresh meat and vegetables — was 

 well known, but no means existed in those days for 

 providing ships with these desirable commodities 

 on their slow and protracted voyages. It seems to 

 have been quite a common misfortune in the 

 seventeenth century on the long voyage to India 

 to be compelled to leave a large proportion of the 

 crew at the Cape — stricken with the scurvy. Lind, 

 the historian of scurvy, in his quaint and racy 

 Treatise on the Scurvy (2nd ed., London, 1757) 

 speaks in no uncertain tone both of the cause of 

 the disease and of the most rapid and convenient 

 remedies, correctly ascribing it to abstinence from 

 fresh vegetable food. Scurvy seems also to have 

 been common among the civilian population, owing 

 no doubt to the scanty allowance of meat and green 

 food available for the poorer classes. Thanks to 

 the increased rapidity of transport and the improved 

 facilities for the provision of fresh meat, vegetables 

 and fruit, adult scurvy has become much less 

 familiar in our days and occurs comparatively 

 rarely except in cases of long-continued absence 

 from centres of civilisation, such as arise in polar 

 expeditions or under the strenuous conditions of 

 modern war. 



Less rare, perhaps, though fortunately far from 

 common, is infantile scurvy, first clearly differen- 

 tiated from rickets by Cheadle and by Barlow in 

 the 'seventies and 'eighties of last century, and now 



