1747: Aboard one of His Majesty's ships, a British doctor begins clinical testing that will uncover the cause of scurvy and lead to its cure.
Seafaring in the age of sail was backbreaking work and fraught with peril, but the sailor's real scourge was scurvy. The symptoms of the disease, caused by vitamin C deficiency, include fatigue, anemia, swollen and bleeding gums, loose teeth, slow-healing wounds, and subcutaneous hemorrhaging and other bleeding.
A debilitating condition at any time, in the 18th century scurvy often proved fatal to sailors a long way from shore and the curative properties of fresh citrus. Of course, no one understood the curative powers of fresh citrus in those days.
Although scurvy had been documented by Europeans since the Crusades, its precise cause remained a mystery. (Vitamin C, in fact, wasn't discovered until the 20th century.) Although sailing ships had always included plenty of fruit and vegetables in their stores, lack of refrigeration meant they had to be eaten early in the voyage. As European empires expanded and voyages lengthened during the 17th and 18th centuries, scurvy became more prevalent.
Dr. James Lind, a Royal Navy surgeon, had a hunch that diet was involved, and he got to put his theory to the test when he shipped aboard* *the Salisbury. Taking a dozen men stricken with scurvy, Lind divided them into six groups of two and administered specific dietetic supplements to each group. The two lucky sailors who were fed lemon and oranges for six days recovered, and one was even declared fit for duty before the Salisbury reached port.
Writing about his experiment in A Treatise of the Scurvy, Lind described the remarkable improvement in the two men:
Although the Salisbury experiment is still widely regarded as the pivotal moment in the conquest of scurvy, Capt. James Cook is also credited with mitigating the disease by careful management of his crews' diets. Later scholarship turns up other dissenting views as well.
One reason for that may be that the Royal Navy, even then the hidebound institution whose traditions Winston Churchill apocryphally dismissed, in a fit of pique, as "rum, sodomy and the lash," was slow to react to Lind's evidence. It would take nearly a half century before the Admiralty accepted Lind's findings and began issuing lemon or lime juice to its sailors as a standard ration. When it was finally done, scurvy all but vanished from the fleet.
And that, children, is how British sailors (and Brits in general) came to be known as limeys.
Source: Various
Illustration from Man-of-War by Stephen Biesty (Dorling-Kindersley, NY, 1993).
See Also:*
*
May 20, 1873: The Pants That Changed the World
April 28, 1947: Kon-Tiki Sets Sail From Peru
Dec. 27, 1831: Beagle Sets Sail With a Very Special Passenger
March 27, 1794: It's Anchors Aweigh for the U.S. Navy
