THE STORY OF LIME-JUICE AND SCURVY 233 



for medical research has done work in its laboratories in 

 Chelsea Gardens of the very greatest national importance 

 during the war. It was founded by public subscription, 

 and has now an endowment of some £1 0,000 a year. 

 Sir David Bruce, the chairman of its Council, gives in 

 the Report of the Governing Body for 19 19 a very striking 

 summary of the work done in the laboratories and by the 

 staff of the Institute. The successful investigation of 

 trench fever and of tetanus, of the destruction of lice, and 

 of the effects of cold storage on food, besides the study 

 of scurvy and other diseases due to deficiency of what 

 are now called " accessory food factors" are, we learn, 

 the chief matters in which the Lister Institute was en- 

 gaged in the year 191 8- 19. Besides this, however, at its 

 farm at Elstree it has prepared and supplied to the War 

 Office, the Admiralty, the Overseas Forces, and the Local 

 Government Board more than a million doses of anti- 

 toxins (diphtheria and tetanus), bacterial vaccines (cholera, 

 plague, influenza), and other similar curative fluids — 

 requiring for their safe production the highest skill and 

 most complete knowledge of recent discovery. And this 

 is only a sample of what the Lister Institute has been 

 doing for many consecutive years. 



Now we return to the investigation of scurvy. Within 

 the last ten years the fact has been established (which 

 was more or less guessed and acted upon by medical men 

 of past days) that, in order to maintain health, the diet 

 of man and of many animals must contain not merely 

 the necessary quantities of meat or cheese-like bodies, 

 of fat and starch and sugar, but also minute quantities 

 of accessory food-factors which it is convenient to term 

 " vitamines." The name serves (though its etymology is 

 unsatisfactory) to indicate certain "proteids" or highly 

 complex nitrogenous compounds which are only to be 

 obtained from fresh and uncooked or slightly heated 



