ill with what we know today as scurvy when his mother became pregnant. She weaned him on mashed potatoes and boiled milk. The boy was slowly dying, and had painful sores, bleeding gums, and swollen joints. One day while his mother was peeling apples, McCollum started to suck on the peels. When on the following day he felt a little better, she fed him more apple skins. When spring came, she gave him other fruits and vegetables. McCollum completely recovered from scurvy, but his teeth caused him trouble for the rest of his life. Finally, in 1926 he had all his teeth removed and got dentures. His health improved. McCollum suffered from diverticulitis, and was often in pain. He had a number of operations, and finally his descending colon was removed. Again his health improved. McCollum was blind in his left eye because of a detached retina that doctors were unable to repair. McCollum expressed the wish "that in my old age I want to keep my mind in a state of continual adventure". He got his wish by living twenty-three years in retirement, twenty-two of them in good health. Retirement and death After his 1944 retirement as professor emeritus, he spent ten years writing The History of Nutrition; he also wrote his autobiography, From Kansas Farm Boy to Scientist. McCollum donated his honoraria from prizes and from lecturing to a student loan fund at the University of Kansas that was eventually worth $40,000. In 1943 McCollum gave the American Dietetic Association, known today as the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, a donation that became the foundation's scholarship fund. Now the largest provider of dietetic scholarships, the foundation awards $1,500,000 over three years to about one thousand students. McCollum criticized drugstore vitamin supplements as being no better than old-time patent medicines. In 1947 John Lee Pratt gave $500,000 to Johns Hopkins for the study of trace inorganic elements in life. The McCollum-Pratt Institute formed, and Pratt donated another $1million. McCollum did not participate beyond giving lectures, but he selected the first director, William McElroy. In 1951 Johns Hopkins held a two-day symposium called "The Physiological Role of Certain Vitamins and Trace Elements"; fifteen scientists delivered papers and many of his students and former colleagues returned to see him. About two hundred people contributed several thousand dollars for the painting of an oil portrait of McCollum by Paul Trebilcock in 1954.