The long voyage to the defeat of scurvy
 The
need to include fresh plant food or raw animal flesh in the diet to prevent
disease has been known from ancient times. The preventive and curative
use of lemon juice for scurvy was recommended as early as 1617, and in
1734 abstinence from fresh vegetables was charged with being the primary
cause of the disease.
This knowledge was either disregarded or not widely
known, and some people attributed this scourge of lengthy
sea voyages and polar and desert exploration to other occurrences — even
the direction of the wind in Borneo.
A fortunate landfall would yield scurvy grass (Cochlearia groenlandica).
Within days of eating the leaves, gums shrank back to their normal size,
legs straightened, bruising disappeared, teeth no longer wobbled in gums,
joints stopped aching and energy was restored.
In 1747 the ship’s surgeon James Lind performed what is considered
to be the first controlled experiment, comparing results on two populations
of a factor applied to one group only with all other factors remaining
the same. Two groups of crew members took normal rations but one of the
groups had in addition two oranges and one lemon per day.
The results
conclusively showed that citrus fruits prevent the disease. Little action
followed publication of Lind’s work, partly because he gave conflicting
evidence in the book and partly because the British Admiralty was indifferent
to the welfare of the common sailor.
In the later 1700s James Cook insisted on a diet that included cress,
sauerkraut and an orange extract, together with fresh meat when possible.
But grizzled sea dogs, accustomed to a diet of salt beef and hard tack,
often refused the healthier provisions. It took constant supervision — and
the occasional 12 lashes — before they accepted the regimen. Cook’s
antiscorbutic diet became a model for expeditions and long-distance sea
travel.
It was 1795 before the British navy adopted lemons or limes as standard
issue at sea, but the reason why vegetables and lime juice were effective
remained a mystery. Some continued to have their own ideas about scurvy,
and in the early 1800s the Arctic explorer William Parry advocated beer
and exercise as part of an antiscorbutic regimen. As would be discovered
later, alcohol and exertion both exacerbate the condition.
Regular sips of lemon juice did not always keep scurvy at bay. Victuallers
often issued the juice in concentrated form after boiling it in copper
containers. We now know that heat destroys vitamin C and copper catalyses
the degradation. But at the time nobody knew that lack of the vitamin
was responsible for the disease — or even that vitamins existed — and
sea captains assumed wrongly that Lind’s suggestions did not work.
As
late as 1893 Fridtjof Nansen took to the Arctic a store of provisions
so varied as to supply whatever was needed to fend off scurvy. It was
not until 1932 that vitamin C was identified as the curative agent
for scurvy.
A long-standing question was how the Canadian Eskimos (the Inuit) lived
on an almost vegetable-free diet yet avoided scurvy. The answer is
that most creatures manufacture vitamin C internally and the Inuit
got the
vitamin from fresh meat that was minimally cooked. But explorers tended
to cook their meat thoroughly, thus destroying this life-saving principle.
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