=Scurvy in the World War.=--The greatest advance in medicine during the past generation has been in the fields of hygiene and preventive medicine. One might therefore have expected that the World War would have differed from previous wars in a notable absence of scurvy among the troops and the civilian population. This is true to a limited degree only. Reports which have been published in the course of the war, and especially since hostilities have ceased, show that the troops who were incapacitated by scurvy must have numbered many thousands. As was to be expected, scurvy occurred most often in Russia, where it is endemic. The largest number of cases was reported by Boerich, who as director of a Red Cross Central Station in Russia saw 1343 cases. Other German physicians who had charge of caring for the Russian prisoners give accounts of the occurrence of some hundreds of cases of scurvy. An article by Much and Baumbach gains added interest from the novel suggestion that scurvy is transmitted by means of vermin. That scurvy must have reached large proportions is shown by the fact that in July, 1916, a medical commission was sent by the Germans to investigate the scurvy in a Russian army corps, and that it was necessary to establish for this disease in every division a sanatorium comprising 100 beds. Hoerschelman, who wrote an account of this investigation, blames the bad hygienic surroundings, the lack of sleep, the overexertion, as well as the deficiency of food, for the occurrence of the epidemic. As usual, very few cases occurred among officers. He describes a number of instances where scurvy was feigned by rubbing the gums and making them bleed, or by irritating them with the juice of tobacco. These reports on scurvy in Russia bring us little new from a purely medical standpoint. They emphasize the occurrence of night-blindness as an early and frequent symptom. It is difficult to judge whether this manifestation was due entirely to the scurvy, or was in part the result of other deficiencies in the diet. For instance, Hift states that the night-blindness was cured by cod liver oil, or by the water in which beef liver had been cooked. This would point rather to a deficiency of the fat-soluble vitamine, as these substances could have little effect in curing scurvy. The cases reported by Wassermann, where neuritic pains in the legs played a considerable rôle, evidently are also not simple scurvy, but may well be the result of more than one food deficiency or a complicating ostitis. In the same way some reports show clearly that "hunger edema" complicated scurvy.