Springer thinks that we may find the first traces of scurvy in the expedition of the Normans to Wineland, in the first years of the eleventh century. In admitting that the men commanded by Eric Thorstein were obliged to winter on the western shores of Wineland and almost all succumbed to an endemic malady of that country, proves that it was nothing but scurvy, although that word’s only signification, in Danish, is ulceration of the mouth. We have, besides, another document, which has great authentic value, a proof transmitted to us by our earliest and best chronicler of the Middle Ages, by Joinville, the friend and companion of Saint Louis in his Crusade into Palestine. In his memoirs he gives a very succinct recital of the epidemic of famine and scurvy which attacked the French army on the banks of the Nile in 1248, just after the battles of Mansourah. Says Joinville: “After the two battles just mentioned, commenced our great miseries in the army; at the end of nine days the bodies of our dead soldiers arose to the surface of the water (their tissues were corrupted and rotten), and these corpses floated to a point between our two camps (those of the King and the Duke of Bourgogne), at a point where a bridge touched the water. So many had been slain that a great crowd of corpses floated on the stream for a long distance. The bodies of the dead Saracens were sickening; the army servants threw open a portion of the bridge and permitted the dead infidels to float down the river, but they buried the dead Crusaders in great pits dug in the ground. I saw among other dead the body of the Chamberlain of the Count D’Artois, and many other friends among the slain. “The only fish we had eaten for four months were of the variety called _barbus_, and these _barbus_ fed on the dead bodies, and for this cause and other miseries of the country where never a drop of rain fell sickness entered our army of such a sort that the flesh on the limbs dried and the skin on the legs became black and like old leather boots, and many sick rotted in their groin; and all having the last named symptom died. Another sign of death was when the nose bled.” The relation of Joinville leaves no doubt as to the nature of the epidemic that attacked the Crusaders. Here we have a pen picture of the debility, the hemorrhages, the livid ecchymosis of the skin, the fungous tumefaction and bleeding of the gums, which characterize the disease known as scurvy. According to the writings of some German physicians of the fifteenth century, this malady was endemic in the septentrional portions of Europe upon the shores of the Baltic Sea. In Holland numerous epidemics of scurvy were observed among the lower classes of the population, coinciding with bad conditions of public hygiene. Food consisting of salt and smoked meats, dwellings located on marshy ground, cold atmospheres charged with fogs, etc., etc.