For want of an orange the navy was lost

Because of my newfound interest in Vitamin C, I've been doing some reading on the subject. One very interesting book is available online for free. It's Irwin Stone's 1972 book The Healing Factor:Vitamin C Against Disease, and it can be read here.

(Please note that some of the "next page" links within the document don't work, but the Table of Contents provides working links to all chapters.)

One particularly interesting detail is the reluctance of the British Navy to enforce a diet that would save their sailors from scurvy. Stone recounts:

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the stage had been prepared for advances in the prevention and treatment of scurvy.  Admiral Sir Richard Hawkins, in 1593, protected the crew of the Dainty with oranges and lemons; among others, Commodore Lancaster, in voyages for the East India Company, had shown by 1600 that scurvy was an easily preventable disease.  It remained, however, for James Lind to prove this.  James Lind, surgeon's mate on H.M.S. Salisbury, was ... a keen observer and eventually became known as "the father of nautical medicine."  He conducted the first properly controlled clinical therapeutic trial on record.

The crucial experiment Lind performed in 1747 at sea on the Salisbury, was to take twelve seamen  suffering from the same degree of scurvy and divide them into six groups of two each.  In addition to their regular diet, he gave each group a different, commonly used treatment for scurvy and observed its action.  One group received a quart of cider daily, the second group received twenty-five drops of dilute sulfuric acid three times a day,  the third group was given two spoonfuls of vinegar three times a day, the fourth team drank half a pint of seawater three times a day, the fifth received a concoction of garlic, mustard seed, horseradish, gum myrrh, and balsam of Peru.  The last group received two oranges and one lemon daily for six days.  These last two men improved with such astonishing rapidity that they were used as nurses to care for the others.  There was slight improvement in the cider group but no benefit was observed in the others.  Here was clear-cut, easily understandable evidence of the value of citrus fruit in the cure of scurvy....

What was clear to Lind, and is commonplace to us, was not so readily accepted by the naval bureaucracy of his day.  It took over forty years for the British Admiralty to adopt Lind's simple prophylactic daily dose of one ounce of lemon juice per man.  The official order cam through in 1795, just a year after Lind's death.  It has been estimated that this 42-year delay cost the Royal Navy 100,000 casualties to scurvy.

This simple regimen wiped out scurvy in the naval forces of England, and it became their secret weapon for maintaining their mastery of the seas.  There is no doubt that this simple ration of lemon juice was of far greater importance to the Royal Navy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than all the improvements in speed, firepower, armor, and seaworthiness.  Naval officers of the time asserted that it was equivalent to doubling the fighting force of the navy....  

One would imagine that Lind's clear-cut clinical demonstration and the experiences of the Royal Navy in wiping out the disease would have pointed the way toward banishing this disease completely.  However, it takes much more than logic and clear-cut demonstrations to overcome the inertia and dogma of established thought.  The forty-two years that it took the British Admiralty to adopt Lind's recommendations may seem unduly long, even for a stolid bureaucracy, but this may be a speed record compared with other agencies.  The British Board of Trade took 112 years -- until 1865 -- before similar precautions were adopted for the British merchant marine.  There are records of seamen on the merchant vessels succumbing to scurvy even while delivering lemons to the ships of the Royal Navy.  Over 30,000 cases of scurvy were reported in the American Civil War and it took the U.S. Army until 1895 to adopt antiscorbutic rations.

[Chapters 5 and 6, bold emphasis added.]

Somehow this story put me in mind of some Gilbert & Sullivan lyrics:

Now, landsmen all, whoever you may be
If you want to rise to the top of the tree
If your soul isn't fettered to an office stool
Be careful to be guided by this golden rule
Stick close to your desks and never go to sea
And you all may be Rulers of the Queen's Navy

Comments

[alpha_geek]

That makes sense. It's proper science. And Vitamin C is a proper material substance. The British Navy ruled the waves because it came to understand that alternatives (like aromatherapy, homeopathic potions, praying to heaven, and electric universe pseudoscience) won't cure scurvy.

[Donna]

Just a note of caution. Back in the mid 80's I had a cold/flu situation and started taking a regular sized (can't remember exactly) dose of C My mistake (I think)was buying the cheapest generic brand I could find. My cold/flu improved slowly, but I started getting a constant headache that got worse daily until I couldn't stand to be in a lighted room, almost a migrain I would say. It was constant, no sleep, no light, just misery.
Then, as I kept on looking through old medical books that I had been collecting over the years, I found one small reference to vitamin C causing headaches just like I was having. I stopped taking it and over the next few days the headache gradually went away. This had gone on for weeks already. The bad thing was, I was sensitized to the C and couldn't even drink a cola drink or orange juice, or 7Up for over a year after that without getting an instant headache.
It's probly rare, I haven't heard much about it since then, but just in case you get that headache, look out! lol

[Michael H]

Perhaps the most cogent comment is one MP chose not to emphasize - so I will:

One would imagine that Lind's clear-cut clinical demonstration and the experiences of the Royal Navy in wiping out the disease would have pointed the way toward banishing this disease completely. However, it takes much more than logic and clear-cut demonstrations to overcome the inertia and dogma of established thought.

[MarkL]

A note about the British military: I was reading a book by a member of the tank forces that opposed Rommel in North Africa in WW2. He describes a mysterious disease that affected the tankers; lethargy, bleeding gums, easy bruising, slow healing, easily getting sick. The doctors attributed it to bites by sand fleas. Their diet; bully beef and biscuits. It couldn't be scurvy; they weren't aboard a ship. Hidebound idiots.

Donna: cola drinks don't have any vitamin C.

[Donna]

"Donna: cola drinks don't have any vitamin C."

Posted by: MarkL

"Acids are added to soft drinks for extra bite, and mouth feel. The primary acid used in colas is phosphoric acid, while the one used in citrus flavored drinks is usually citric acid."
http://sci-toys.com/ingredients/soft_drinks.html

Remember this was the mid 80's and I remember checking the label on my can of Pepsi wondering why it had given me a headache. It had Citric acid listed as an ingredient at that time.
It did me good to give up the Pepsi anyway. I feel better for it.

[Donna]

Actually, upon further thought, I may have been drinking Diet Coke at that point. Either way, Citric acid was an ingredient, sorry to mislead.

[Robert McLuhan]

Excellent example, Michael - it's things like this - Richard Milton's revelations about the general indifference to the Wright brothers' successful flights is another - that for me make the disbelief in psi understandable. The collective (bureaucratic) mind operates much more slowly than the individual mind - it takes longer to process information and make the appropriate adjustments. Perhaps we shouldn't judge it too harshly. But the fact that we can look back at such things and marvel is significant: one day humans will feel the same about their ancestors' difficulties with psi.

[MarkL]

Vitamin C is ascorbic acid, not citric acid.

[Donna]

Vitamin C is ascorbic acid, not citric acid.

Posted by: MarkL
Mark, I am not arguing with you about the contents of cola, I am just relating my experience, the headache was awful and I hope nobody else has to suffer it. That was my point.

[Peter Wadhams]

A fascinating fact is that even as recently as 1910 the whole body of knowledge about antiscorbutic properties of lemons and other fruit was forgotten - by the Royal Navy as well! - because a new theory came out that scurvy was caused by eating tainted meat. Thus when Captain Scott went to the Antarctic there was a daily ritual of inspecting all the meat cans to look for pinholes or cracks whereby the taint of scurvy could get in. As a result, Scott's diet was seriously short of vitamins and when he died on the way back from the Pole a major contributing factor was - scurvy.