Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
May,  1914. 
The  Vitamines. 
241 
jection  if  it  is  reasonably  varied.  It  is  where  poverty  or  some 
other  compulsion  is  operative  that  nutritional  disasters  are  likely. 
The  condition  of  the  body  in  scurvy  is  quite  different  from 
that  in  beri-beri  and  the  missing  compounds  are  probably  some- 
what unlike.  Some  articles  of  diet  may  protect  against  both ;  some 
may  be  specific  for  only  one.  Allied  with  scurvy  are  the  disorders 
called  ship  beri-beri,  infantile  scurvy  (Barlow's  disease),  and  the 
experimental  scurvies  which  can  be  produced  in  animals  by  limit- 
ing the  intake  to  a  few  foods.  Still  other  pathological  states  may 
be  found  to  have  a  more  or  less  similar  basis.  An  attempt  has 
been  made  to  justify  the  claim  that  pellagra  is  a  deficiency  disease, 
but  this  is  strongly  contested.  Abnormalities  of  early  development 
such  as  rachitis  (rickets)  and,  perhaps,  later  perversions  of  growth 
such  as  cancer  may  be  connected  with  the  lack  of  certain  chemical 
constituents  in  the  income  of  the  body.  '  At  this  point  it  may  be  in 
order  to  say  that  the  diet  itself  may  conceivably  be  ideal  and  yet 
there  may  be  a  failure  to  utilize  the  vitamines  offered  either  because 
of  a  failure  to  absorb  them  or  because  of  the  premature  decomposi- 
tion in  the  alimentary  tract. 
A  few  years  ago  Crichton-Browne,  an  English  authority,  in 
passing  an  unfavorable  judgment  upon  the  dietetic  standards  of 
Chittenden  and  others  called  attention  to  the  fact  that  the  diet 
approved  by  them  seemed  to  correspond  closely  with  that  of  the 
very  poor.  The  comparison  was  based  upon  fuel  value  and  protein 
content.  It  is  now  possible  to  modify  the  statement  that  the  two  are 
precisely  equivalent.  The  low  diet  of  the  New  Haven  school  is  an 
inclusive  one,  while  that  of  the  poor  is  of  limited  variety.  A  supply 
of  the  requisite  minor  bodies — vitamines,  if  we  adopt  the  term — 
is  much  more  surely  to  be  relied  on  in  the  first  case. 
Bunge,  the  Austrian  physiologist,  pointed  out  in  1901  that  sugar 
is  an  unnatural  food,  in  that  it  has  been  refined  to  the  exclusion 
of  all  compounds  but  saccharose.  Foods  which  are  not  deliberately 
prepared  by  industrial  or  domestic  processes  are  always  mixtures, 
however  much  one  constituent  may  predominate.  The  teaching  of 
Sylvester  Graham  in  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  that 
the  foods  offered  by  nature  should  not  be  separated  into  their  in- 
gredients but  taken  in  their  entirety  is  frequently  reechoed  in  our 
own  day.  In  the  light  of  studies  like  those  of  Funk  it  is  apparent 
that  there  is  a  certain  foundation  for  the  idea  that  foods  may  be 
"  denatured  "  either  by  discarding  valuable  fractions  or  by  modes 
