followed that the cause of the disease must be sought outside of dietary
factors.

Examination of guinea pigs that died of scurvy showed that the cecum was
always full of putrefying feces. This observation suggested that the
mechanical difficulty these animals have in removing feces from this part
of the digestive tract might have something to do with the disease.
McCollum and his workers were confirmed in their views by the excellent
results that followed the use of a mineral oil as a laxative. Another
piece of evidence they gave for their views was that when animals were fed
on oats and milk the onset of the scurvy could be delayed by merely adding
the cathartic, phenolphthalein, to the mixture. They met the argument of
the curative power of orange juice by preparing an artificial juice of
citric acid, inorganic salts and cane sugar and showing that this
synthetic mixture which held only known substances was capable of
protecting animals from scurvy over a long period of time. Without going
further into the evidence presented by these workers McCollum was
sufficiently convinced of the correctness of his own views to not only
state them in his researches but to set them forth at length for public
information in his book entitled _The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition_.
In spite of all this evidence his views failed to convince the holders of
the vitamine hypothesis. Harden and Zilva and Chick and Hume in England
freely criticised his conclusions because whole milk was used in his
experiments and no attention paid to the amounts eaten. It was then well
known that if enough whole milk is eaten scurvy will not develop. Cohen
and Mendel autopsied normal guinea pigs and found that the cecum was
nearly always full of feces. On the other hand in autopsies of many pigs
dead from scurvy only one-fourth were found to show the impaction of feces
claimed by McCollum as cause of the disease. Milk is constipating to
guinea pigs. Large amounts of milk should therefore have increased scurvy