Page 28 - Delaware Medical Journal - May 2017
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Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery
James F. Lally, MD
obscure clockmaker, John Harrison. He was
a pragmatist and experimenter who was undeterred by theories; his observations eventually won over skeptics such as
Jonathan Lamb – Princeton University Press, 2016, 317 pages, $35
In his remarkable monograph, A Treatise of the Scurvy in Three Parts, published in 1753, the British Royal Navy Surgeon
James Lind wrote: “Armies lose more of their men by sickness than by the sword..... where the scurvy alone, during the last
war, proved a more destructive enemy, and cut off more valuable lives, than the united
If Rule Britannia was to dominate in the European wars of attrition, the health of vital to its naval strategy. With the ravenous appetite of the British Empire for conquest and exploration to the other side of the globe, its preeminence as a world power was ultimately closely tied to the superiority of its naval forces. Since historians estimate that scurvy resulted in two million deaths between 1500 and 1800 in the world’s navies, the country that solved the riddle would be triumphant in control of the seas.
In his painstakingly researched book, Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery, Jonathan Lamb, a professor of humanities
at Vanderbilt University, takes the reader on a voyage that explores the far reaches of the then-known world and into an early medical trial whose results erased the symptoms
of scurvy. As Lamb so artfully details in his book, an unlikely malady — scurvy — linked the maritime exploits of Vasco de Gama and Captain James Cook with the ill- fated Antarctic exploration over a century later of Robert Falcon Scott. Two heroes stand out in the book: Captain James Cook and James Lind.
Forlorn naysayers, such as Scott, who spurned Lind’s research, ultimately paid
a heavy price for their indifference. In an
knowledge, Scott’s senior surgeon on his Antarctic expeditions of 1902-1904 stated: “There is no antiscorbutic property in any of pemmican, biscuits, and
butter doomed some of the men in his company to malnutrition and an untimely death.
Order and discipline was
demanded on a British ship
of the line, scurvy promoted
disorder and weakened morale.
A ship’s crew was a small,
close-knit community, and
scurvy brought them shame
and embarrassment. Few ship’s captains were more aware of
this than the revered British sea captain, James Cook.
Preceding Cook’s voyages (by over two centuries) was Ferdinand Magellan’s dramatic feat of circumnavigation of the not without cost, as many died during the voyage. As they crossed from the Atlantic Ocean through the later named Straits of were depleted and starvation ensued. A diarist on board the ship described the gingival hypertrophy, a telltale sign of scurvy: “In some men the gums grew over the teeth, both lowers and uppers, so that they could not eat in any way and thus they died of this sickness.”
Cook’s seamanship and navigational skills were considered exceptional in an era when the concept of latitude and its relationship century. For the British Admiralty solving the problem of knowing exactly where a ship was on the high seas rivaled a cure for scurvy. Dava Sobel in her award-winning book, Latitude, described the solution: the invention of a marine chronometer by an
its treatment
Sir Isaac Newton. A clock modeled after Harrison’s
was employed during Cook’s second voyage to the South Seas, albeit with mixed results.
But Harrison’s meticulous trial and error techniques (an empiricism that grew out of the Age of Enlightenment) did for those seeking a remedy for scurvy. Rival theories as to the cause of scurvy and clashed for over a century.
were the toxic food idea and the later-to-
theory. Lind was well aware of the controversy as he pointedly wrote: “It is no easy matter to root out old prejudices, or to sums it up: “it was necessary to remove a great deal of rubbish.”
The Age of Sail and exploration inevitably led to the colonizing of the far reaches of a yet unexplored world. This further challenged the navigational talents of mariners and call to replenish food stores so that the stigma of scurvy would not blemish their voyages.
It was the attempt to rid and exile the criminal elements from late Georgian England that culminated in the settlement of a terra incognita — Australia. For those convicts who were banished to what Robert Hughes in his epic book about the founding of Australia called the “fatal shore,” scurvy proved as deadly in the passage to Down Under as in the prisons of England. In the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth
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