Idlewords has a fascinating essay on the history of scurvy: Scott’s Antarctic expedition in 1911 was plagued by the disease, despite its having been “conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease.” How it all went wrong would make a lovely case study for a philosophy of science class.

(I can’t help summarising the juiciest morsel: the British Admiralty switched their scurvy cure from lemon juice to lime juice in 1860. The new cure was much less effective, but by that time advances in technology meant that most sea voyages were so short that there was little or no danger of scurvy anyway. So poor Scott’s expedition, as well as applying “state-of-the-art” (i.e. wrong) cures, were falling back on a “tried-and-true” remedy that in fact had been largely ineffective already for 50 years… without anyone noticing.)

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