Not by bread alone--Eating meat and fat for stay Lean and Healthy by Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Author:Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788892634725
Publisher: Youcanprint
Published: 2016-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

- 8 The Blackleg in Our Time

Thus from the beginning of modern exploration had scurvy been the great enemy of the explorer. During the circumnavigation by Magellan's expedition, 1519-22, many died from it. When Scott's party went by sledge to the South Pole four centuries later, in 1912, their strength was sapped by scurvy; they were unable to maintain their travel schedule, and died. Nor has scurvy been the nemesis of explorers only. In the First World War the British army in the Near East was seriously handicapped by it; in October, 1935, an American doctor reported that a hundred Ethiopian soldiers per day were dying of scurvy among the troops which struggled against the Italians; there was scurvy among United States troops in the Second World War. The disease wrought havoc during the Alaska and Yukon gold rushes following 1896, when scores of miners died from it. It was a medical delusion for several hundred years that doctors knew exactly how to prevent and how to cure scurvy. The premise from which the doctors started was that vegetables, particularly fruits, prevent blackleg. Since diet consists of animals and plants, the statement came to take the form that scurvy is caused by meat and cured by vegetables. Finally the doctors standardized on lime juice as the best of preventives and cures. They named it a sure cure, a specific. Lawmakers followed the doctors. It is on statute books that during long voyages the crew is to be supplied with lime juice and induced or compelled to take it. From officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and from sourdoughs, I have in my notebooks many a case of suffering and death caused by scurvy in the Alaska and Yukon gold rushes. The miner generally began to sicken toward the end of winter. He had been living on beans and bacon, on fresh bread, rice, oatmeal, sugar, dried fruits and dried vegetables. When he recognized his trouble as scurvy, he made such efforts as were possible to get the things which he believed would cure him. Apparently the miner's faith was strongest in raw potatoes. These had to be brought from afar, and there are heroic tales of men who struggled through the wilderness to succor a comrade with a few pounds of what Alaska called spuds. There were similar beliefs in the virtue of onions and some other vegetables. Curiously, there was either no faith in those vegetables which were locally obtainable, or else a belief that they should be treated in a way which, we now understand, destroys their value. For instance, a man might have been cured with a salad of the leaves or the green bark of trees. What the miners did with the pine needles and willow bark was to cook them for hours and drink the tea. If they had fresh meat, which would have been curative as an underdone steak or roast, they boiled it to shreds and drank the broth. Death frequently occurred in two to four months.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.