James Lind and scurvy

The old storyThe old story of the conquest of scurvy in the British Navy has been a long time dying.The story runs as follows.In 1753, James Lind published his Treatise of the scurvy.1At the heart of his book is the record of his clinical trial of a number of potential cures for the disease.Oranges and lemons came out as the conclusive winners.However, the Admiralty procrastinated for over forty years before accepting Lind's findings.Not until 1795 was lemon juice issued to sailors.At once, scurvy was banished from the fleet.A number of historians of naval medicine, notably Coulter, Keevil, Lloyd and Carpenter, have shown up deficiencies in this story.2They have shown that the simple tale of a heroic, pioneering Lind and the dilatory Lords of the Admiralty will not do.In their more complex accounts of scurvy and its treatments during the second half of the eighteenth century, Lind no longer stars as the single, decisive character in the story.He appears as just one -albeit an important one -of a number of eighteenth century contributors to the debate about the mysterious disease of scurvy.Yet these historians, like many others, are still powerfully drawn to the five paragraphs in Lind's 358 page Treatise that describe what he called 'experiments', at sea in May

Art · Ascorbic acid · Scurvy · Chemistry · Classics · Marine animal studies overview · Ocean Acidification Effects and Responses · Philosophy · Food Science

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