Scurvy amongst sailors
On lengthy voyages, a loss of half the crew to this disease became expected and in extreme cases it could be much worse. Out living the disease didn’t mean you weren’t scared by it, with surviving sailors coming home with no hair or teeth. Navy surgeons scrambled to find a cure, as 18th-century science was ill equipped for the challenge. At this time, the field was dominated by Hippocrates, 2,000-year-old theories of balancing the four humors. It is known today that a lack of dietary Vitamin C causes scurvy, but vitamins weren’t discovered until the 20th century.
It took a young scotsman by the name of James Lind to begin looking at diet as a revolutionary cure for the disease. He read the accounts of early explorers in North America who noticed that Native American seamen supplemented their diet of dried meat with pine needle tea. A century earlier, an East Indian company noted that citrus fruit, particularly lemons, had a dramatic effect on patient recovery.
