Although the experience of the British navy and of several Arctic expeditions had thoroughly convinced physicians and officers of ships that lime juice was a specific remedy for scurvy, there were a number of widely known outbreaks of the disease which kept alive the idea that it was not necessarily due to the lack of some essential substance in the diet. One of these was the experience in 1875-77 of the expedition of Sir George Nares to the polar regions made in the two ships, the Alert and the Discovery. The crews of both of these suffered severely from scurvy, although lime juice was regularly administered to all the men. It appears that the lime juice carried by this expedition was inferior, and was probably adulterated. The history of this and other early events in the history of the use of anti-scorbutic foods has been interestingly written by Alice Henderson Smith (3).

In 1895-96 the British Army garrisoned at Chitral in India, suffered severely from scurvy, not a man having escaped it, notwithstanding the fact that lime juice was regularly administered daily. In 1902, the men who constituted the party of Captain Scott in his voyage to the Antarctic, developed scurvy in spite of the fact that they were well supplied with West Indian lime juice. On this occasion the men were saved by the substitution of fresh seal meat for canned meats; mustard and cress were grown for consumption in the raw state, and the consumption of bottled fruits was increased as far as possible. It may be said at the outset that the juice of limes grown in the West Indies has been shown to be of but one quarter the value of limes from the Mediterranean region. Doubtless some of the lime juice provided in those cases where failure of protection against scurvy resulted, was due to adulteration, or to the heating of the juice for the purposes of preservation. It is now known that heating tends to destroy the substance which gives fresh fruits and vegetables their protective value. Recent investigations have also shown that there is a difference in the protective power of fresh and preserved meats. Arctic explorers had great faith in the virtue of fresh meat, whereas experience proved that salted or canned meats repeatedly proved ineffective.