Those brown spots, swollen joints and tender gums
He was just a little boy. He lived in the country. So why were brown spots spreading on his skin, why were his joints swollen and aching, why were his gums bleeding?
No one knew. Nobody had a cure.
His mother ignored the nutritional advice of the day, advice that suggested that all that a little boy needed was meat and bread and sugar and fat. She gave him milk and vegetables as well.
The little boy worked hard, made his way out of Fort Scott, Kansas, graduated from the University of Kansas in 1903, and got his doctorate from Yale a few years later. His gums healed, his joints stopped hurting, his brown spots receded.
His name was Elmer McCollum. If you are not a nutritionist or dietician, you may never have heard of him, as I had not until recently. We are all his debtors, though.
His Newer Knowledge of Nutrition (1918) sold 14,000 copies in its first three years and went into five editions by 1939. It was one of the first books to suggest that more was needed in the diet than protein, carbohydrates, minerals and water. Vitamins in fact. Vitamin A was the name he gave to whatever it was in milk fat that enabled growth in animals (including humans).
And those brown spots. Scurvy. In Kansas. Just over a hundred years ago. He wasn’t unusual. Lots of rural American children suffered from scurvy.
Now they don’t, thanks to MCollum and his colleagues in the US and elsewhere. We’ve come a long, long way.
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This is just one of the interesting stories in the new book, Milk: A Local and Global History (Yale University Press,) authored by Deborah Valenze of Barnard College. A specialist in British cultural history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she’s written a book that is readable but scholarly. Just the kind of book I love, just the kind of book that is needed to move food history ahead and provide a good base for the politics of food. One to add to your list.
