MILK SURVEY OF THE CITY OF ROCHESTER & 



to be fed up on lime, and pretty soon are out in apparently a normal con- 

 dition because they go to the hospital in the early stages of the disease. 

 This condition has taken a toll of tens of thousands of lives throughout 

 China, the Philippines, and several tropical parts of the world, and a few 

 other places. 



"The eye disease which I first described as being due to a lack of 

 something such as butter fat supplies, I know of at least fifteen hundred 

 cases of it, chiefly among children who use a cereal diet too largely and 

 have developed this swelling of the tissues around the eyes. Many went 

 blind ; others were cured through the very keen observation of a physician 

 named Morey who had the acuteness of observation to discover that if he 

 gave these children a sufficient amount of chicken livers, their eyes would 

 get well. I have already mentioned the fact that the fats from the inside 

 of the cells of liver or of the kidney of an animal contain this unknown 

 something which butter fat supplies. Over in Denmark a physician 

 named Spuck, near Copenhagen, reported he met with about sixty chil- 

 dren in the rural districts who had this eye trouble. He said that these 

 were the children of milk producers ; that there being such a good market 

 for butter and cream they passed the milk through a centrifugal sepa- 

 rator and sold the cream, and fed the babies on skim milk and before long 

 they developed this eye trouble. He supposed that this was a fat defi- 

 ciency disorder. We now know he was wrong in one respect ; that you 

 could give a child all the skim milk and the olive oil and cotton seed 

 oil or vegetable oils that you could get, but you would not relieve that 

 eye trouble, but if you give him whole milk, (and he did do that), the 

 eyes come right back to normal. 



" Apparently this disease is fairly common in various parts of Egypt 

 and Southern China. I rely in making this statement on the opinion of 

 Dr. Heiser of the International Health Bureau, who expressed this view 

 after examining some animals in New York. This disease had been pro- 

 duced experimentally in my laboratory ; he thought it was the same thing 

 he had seen many times in Egypt and Southern China. 



"I was very much interested about two weeks ago to receive a letter 

 from a physician who was in Atlantic City, stating that very recently 

 near Warsaw in Poland, his attention had been attracted by about thirty 

 children sitting on a little hummock and whose movements were peculiar, 

 and led to the arresting of his attention. He went over and examined 

 them and discovered through his examination and information obtained 

 from others, that these children were either blind or nearly blind, and they 

 regarded it there as starvation blindness, which is apparently another in- 

 stance. He said, This is fairly widespread in certain parts of Poland.' 

 There are other instances of the occurrence in this country of this par- 

 ticular deficiency disease. 





