The Vitamine Manual | Page 9

be sought outside of dietary factors.
Examination of guinea pigs that died of scurvy showed that the cecum
was always full of putrefying feces. This observation suggested that the
mechanical difficulty these animals have in removing feces from this
part of the digestive tract might have something to do with the disease.
McCollum and his workers were confirmed in their views by the
excellent results that followed the use of a mineral oil as a laxative.
Another piece of evidence they gave for their views was that when
animals were fed on oats and milk the onset of the scurvy could be
delayed by merely adding the cathartic, phenolphthalein, to the mixture.
They met the argument of the curative power of orange juice by
preparing an artificial juice of citric acid, inorganic salts and cane sugar
and showing that this synthetic mixture which held only known
substances was capable of protecting animals from scurvy over a long
period of time. Without going further into the evidence presented by
these workers McCollum was sufficiently convinced of the correctness
of his own views to not only state them in his researches but to set them
forth at length for public information in his book entitled The Newer
Knowledge of Nutrition. In spite of all this evidence his views failed to
convince the holders of the vitamine hypothesis. Harden and Zilva and
Chick and Hume in England freely criticised his conclusions because
whole milk was used in his experiments and no attention paid to the
amounts eaten. It was then well known that if enough whole milk is
eaten scurvy will not develop. Cohen and Mendel autopsied normal
guinea pigs and found that the cecum was nearly always full of feces.

On the other hand in autopsies of many pigs dead from scurvy only
one-fourth were found to show the impaction of feces claimed by
McCollum as cause of the disease. Milk is constipating to guinea pigs.
Large amounts of milk should therefore have increased scurvy if the
cause stated by McCollum was the real one. On the contrary large
amounts of milk prevented scurvy and small doses permitted it to
develop. The use of coarse materials as a preventative of constipation
failed to prevent scurvy onset. Hess and Unger found that cod-liver oil
and liquid petrolatum prevented constipation but failed to prevent
scurvy.
The attack on the McCollum view continued from various quarters.
Chick and Hume in England examined his grain and milk fed series and
showed that those receiving much milk and little grain recovered while
those on the reverse diet died. They held that all guinea pigs with
scurvy become constipated regardless of the diet. They gave large
quantities of dried vegetables well cooked in water, in order to provide
bulk, but this did not prevent scurvy and neither did the use of mineral
oil. Hess found that in infants with scurvy there is a history of
constipation but that while potatoes which are not laxative cure scurvy,
malt soups which are laxative permit its development. He found that
scurvy in infants is relieved by amounts of orange juice entirely too
small to have a marked laxative action and was unable to secure cures
with McCollum's artificial orange juice. The most convincing argument
was the discovery that orange juice administered intravenously still
exerted a curative action which could not in any way be laid to its
effect on constipation.
To these attacks McCollum's co-worker, Pitz, suggested a new
hypothesis. It was well known that in rats and man the intestinal flora
can be changed from a putrefactive form to a non-putrefactive type by
feeding milk sugar or lactose. If this were true, as was admitted by all,
and the scurvy due to the absorption of putrefactive products, this
absorption might still be the causal factor whether constipation was
present or absent. To determine this point he fed his guinea pigs on
oatmeal to which he added a carbohydrate diet. When the carbohydrate
was lactose he was able to cure and prevent scurvy. This evidence was

not considered convincing, however, since in his experiments milk was
given freely. Furthermore, Cohen and Mendel demonstrated that in
their experiments pure lactose neither prevented nor cured scurvy while
Harden and Zilva could find no antiscorbutic value in either cane sugar,
fructose, or sirup. These authors believed and stated that Pitz's results
were entirely attributable to the free use of raw milk.
As this milk factor came increasingly to the attention in the controversy
it was natural that students began to reëxamine this product more
carefully. The vitamine advocates at first believed that its potency as an
antiscorbutic was of course due to the vitamines already found present
therein, viz., the "A" or the "B." But there began to be difficulties with
this view. Hess found that