The epidemic feature of the disease led many to the opinion that it was contagious--a view that retained its hold for many years. It was also considered to be of a miasmatic character, which, with the previous feature, seemed to assimilate it in nature with typhus fever and other diseases of the miasmatic contagious group. This view had a vigorous advocate in Villemin, who in 1874 read a lengthy paper before the Royal Academy of Medicine in its support. His arguments were specious, inconclusive, and inaccurate, the weight both of facts and authority being decisively against his view. Its occurrence among members of the same family led a few to regard it as hereditary, and it was thought to be transmissible from the mother to the recently-born as well as to nursing infants. The depressing influence of certain emotions, fear, anxiety, and nostalgia, upon the functions of nutrition has, as might have been anticipated, been noted as contributing indirectly to the manifestation of epidemics of scurvy in the presence of the essential determining dietetic causes. Scurvy cannot be regarded, as Lhéridon-Cremorne[3] has argued, as the last term of nostalgia, the other alleged causes being secondary; nor as the immediate result of mental depression, as Gueit[4] believed from his experience in the ship Henry IV. during his service on the blockade in the Black {170} Sea in 1858, because the disease first invaded those laboring under nostalgia. The currency of such opinions may be readily explained by the fact that ordinarily depressing mental influences occur under the same conditions as those associated with scurvy--viz. during sieges, after defeat, in prisons, and in workhouses; and, further, the mental phenomena ordinarily occur as prodromes of the disease long before the pathognomonic phenomena present themselves. Out of these facts grew the mistake of regarding the mental change as causative instead of consecutive. Murray went farther and regarded mental despondency as at once cause and effect, and long ago scurvy was compared to hypochondriacal diseases.[5] It may be concluded from the recorded epidemics that no degree of mental exhilaration could ward off the disease in presence of the determining causes, nor any degree of mental despondency induce it with proper alimentation. [Footnote 3: _Thèse de Paris_.] [Footnote 4: _Thèse de Montpellier_, 1858.] [Footnote 5: Dolée, 1684.]