SYMHC Classics: Scurvy

This 2020 episode covers scurvy, a deficiency in vitamin C. Its story goes way back in history – all the way to our evolutionary ancestors living more than 60 million years ago. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Our recent installment of six Impossible episodes talked
about Nelly Cashman's efforts to get fresh vegetables to some
miners who were starving and developing scurvy. I don't remember
if we mentioned it in that episode, but we do
have a whole episode on the history of scurvy in
It's Today's Saturday Classic. It came out on December thirtieth,

(00:23):
twenty twenty, and you can tell we were a little
frazzled after months of relative isolation in that first stretch
of the COVID nineteen pandemic. We got a couple of
corrections after this first came out. We talk about the
genetic mutation that kept our long ago ancestors from being
able to produce their own vitamin C, but that wasn't

(00:43):
a big issue because overwhelmingly they were living in tropical
areas and eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. We
say that had they not been eating lots of foods
that were rich in vitamin C, they would have died out.
One letter writer noted that only the people carrying the
mutation would have died out. Everybody else would have been fine.
Another correction from another listener pointed out that we did

(01:06):
not explain that heat breaks down vitamin C. We talked
about vitamin C being destroyed by cooking and by pasteurization
and by concentrating juice down into a rob which is
done by boiling. So heat is the common element among
all those things. And the last is that we read
the full title of the reference book, The Surgeon's Mate,
which was full of the word yee spelled ye. This

(01:29):
correction noted that the why there was in place of
the character thorn, which would be pronounced th which is true,
but would not have been nearly as funny. So enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy P.

(01:55):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This episode is the last
episode I am for the year twenty twenty. It's been
a year. Hooray, yeah, hooray. Also, I'm just I've had
minimal contact with anybody besides my spouse in almost nine months,
and for some reason, my brain keeps being like scurvy.

(02:16):
And that connection doesn't make sense really, because if I
were to get a vitamin deficiency because of the pandemic,
it would probably be about vitamin D from the not
going out into the sun. Is that what you're saying
is that your brain is making a weird jump of
concern of vitamin deficiency. Maybe not concern, but maybe more

(02:40):
like at least I don't have scurvy, like huh, but brain,
that doesn't make any sense anyway. That's what we're going
to talk about today, is scurvy because just for some
weird reason, my brain keeps coming back around to it
in these times of winter and pandemic. So skirv in
case you don't know, and you probably do, is a

(03:02):
deficiency in vitamin C or a sorbic acid, and its
story goes way way back in history, all the way
to our evolutionary ancestors living more than sixty million years ago.
With a few exceptions including guinea pigs and bats. Most
mammals can generate their own acorbic acid, and that included
those primate ancestors. But somewhere along the way, a random

(03:25):
genetic mutation broke the ability to produce an enzyme known
as L glunolactone oxidase or GULO, which is a necessary
part of making a sorbic acid. Acorbic acid is also
necessary the body uses it to synthesize the protein collagen,
and collagen is a crucially important part of our connective tissue.

(03:46):
We need it to do really important things like hold
our skin and blood vessels together. So if the body
cannot replace worn out collagen, it causes serious problems. The
first symptoms of scurvy involve fatigu lethargy, and aching joints.
People start to bruise easily, wounds won't heal, and old
wounds reopen. The gums start to bleed, and the teeth

(04:11):
start to loosen and can in fact come out entirely.
This is also accompanied by foul odors, including very bad breath.
Without treatment with vitamin C, scurvy is eventually fatal, often
because of acute internal bleeding around the brain or heart.
But when our ancestors stopped being able to produce guloh,

(04:32):
this really did not matter. They were living in tropical
areas and their diets included lots of fresh fruits and vegetables,
so they were getting plenty of vitamin C through their food.
If this had not been true, this genetic mutation that
shut off the ability to synthesize guloh would have wiped
them out, but since their diets were rich with vitamin C,

(04:52):
they continued to thrive. As people started living farther from
tropical areas, they started eating more foods that did not
necessarily contain as much vitamin CEA, but most of the
time this was still not a big problem. Most dietary
recommendations call for significantly more vitamin C, but it doesn't
actually take that much just to prevent scurvy. Only about

(05:13):
ten milligrams a day are all you need, and although
vitamin C is mostly associated with fruits and vegetables, it
is found in other foods as well. Most meat contains
a little if it hasn't been cooked too long, and
liver and kidney meat in particular contained quite a bit
of it. So, as one example, the practice of eating
raw organ meat in far northern indigenous communities provides protection

(05:36):
from scurvy even when plant based foods are unavailable or
out of season. So as communities established themselves around the world,
people had to have some kind of vitamin C in
their diets, otherwise that community just could not survive. But
anytime that access to food was cut off in some way,

(05:56):
say because of a war or a famine, people could
start to develop scurvy. And this was also true for
people with diseases and conditions that kept them from eating
or kept them from absorbing the nutrients and their food.
And the word scurvy comes from older terms that mean lazy, scabbed,
or scurf, which used to be used to describe dandruff.

(06:18):
People started using it to describe this disease in about
the sixteenth century, but written descriptions of scurvy that predate
that word are much older. The earliest likely description of
scurvy is found in the Egyptian document known as the
ebers Papyrus, which dates back to about fifteen hundred BCE.
Past podcast subject Shushruda described a condition involving bleeding gums

(06:41):
and loosening teeth around eight hundred BCE. Roughly four hundred
years later, Greek physician Hippocrates described what was probably scurvy,
and while he did not go into detail about the
cure he knew for it, he did note that it
wasn't effective and that patients usually died Ditional Chinese medicine
texts describe collections of symptoms that very much resemble scurvy

(07:05):
as well, so today scurvy is associated with long sea
voyages and his humanity took to the sea. People worked
out some ways to prevent it, although really without necessarily
knowing that that was what they were doing. Many of
the earliest seafarers stuck close to the coasts or they
island topped, and that gave them plenty of opportunities to

(07:27):
stock up on fresh food. But as voyages got longer,
many also had foods on board that were rich in
vitamin C. It's possible that Polynesian wayfinders introduced sweet potatoes
to Central and South America. They would have brought them
with them over thousands of miles of ocean, and sweet

(07:47):
potatoes contained vitamin C. Scandinavians stocked their ships with cloud berries,
which have about four times as much vitamin C as
oranges do. Unpasteurized milk also contains vitamin SEA, so seafarers
who had dairy animals on board could get it that way.
While scurvy was common enough to be documented in ancient

(08:08):
medical literature, one of the first specifically documented outbreaks happened
in the thirteenth century during the Eighth Crusade. King Louis
the ninth lay siege to Tunis. Although there were plenty
of fresh fruits and vegetables available in the area, the
king and his fighting force were mostly eating fish, and
many were also undertaking religious fasts. The king and about

(08:30):
a sixth of his men died of disease during this siege.
For a long time, their deaths were attributed to plague,
but more recent research has found evidence of scurvy in
the king's jawbone. Not long after this, scurvy started to
become a serious problem on European ships during long sea voyages,
and most of the literature that's related to scurvy in

(08:53):
history today is focused primarily on Europe and its colonies,
mostly during the Age of Exploration, which was from a
about the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. But of course
Europeans were not the only people taking to the sea
at this point. It's possible that other nations aren't as
represented in English language literature because of language barriers or prejudice,

(09:14):
but it's also possible that scurvy was just not as
much of a problem outside of European fleets. Most of
the time, it takes between two months and twelve weeks
without vitamin CEA for a person to develop scurvy, and
while sailors from parts of Africa and Asia were taking
voyages that lasted much longer than that, overall, often they

(09:34):
were not going that long between stops to resupply. It
also seems like they may have been doing a better
job at providing their crews with foods rich in vitamin Sea.
Past podcast subject Ibin Batuta, who was from what's now
Morocco and traveled extensively during the fourteenth century, described green
vegetables and ginger being grown in tanks on Chinese vessels.

(09:57):
He also wrote about salted ginger, pepper, lemon, and mangoes
being loaded onto ships in preparation for long voyages. Another
previous podcast subject is Jungha, who led fleets of treasure
ships from China all the way to Africa in the
fifteenth century, and we don't have lists of exactly what
provisions he took, but we do know that his fleets

(10:18):
included huge supply vessels whose whole purpose was sustaining the
voyage itself, and that the ships had kitchens that prepared
meals for crews and passengers. There are also multiple references
to tea in relation to his voyages, and tea does
contain some vitamin C. For the most part, written records
of scurvy on Chinese vessels don't really start until the

(10:42):
nineteenth century, when people left China bound for California during
the Gold Rush. But European ships were another story. Especially
as European ships crossed whole oceans. People's diets were often
restricted to salted meat and hardtack and not much else. Typically,
any vegetables grown on board were only for the officers. Consequently,

(11:05):
it's estimated that scurvy killed two million European sailors between
the fifteenth century and the nineteenth century, which is when
navies started to more consistently connect scurvy prevention to things
like citrus juice. During these centuries, scurvy was the leading
cause of death among sailors at sea. It was also

(11:25):
a major cause of death among enslaved Africans during the
Transatlantic slave trade, although the details of that aspect have
not been nearly as specifically documented as with ship's crews.
And we're going to talk about some more specific scurvy
information after we first pause for a little sponsor break. Today,

(11:54):
scurvy is treated almost like a punchline in pirate jokes,
but it was an enormous problem for hundreds of years.
Scurvy killed a hundred of the original one hundred and
seventy crew during Vasco de Gama's voyage to the Indian
subcontinent that started in fourteen ninety seven. For Nan Magellan

(12:15):
left Spain with a fleet of five ships in fifteen nineteen,
searching for a way to reach Asia from Europe by
traveling west by sea. Only eighteen of his original crew
of two hundred and seventy made it back to Spain
in fifteen twenty two, with scurvy being a major cause
of death. Here is how one of Magellan's crew described

(12:37):
conditions in his journal quote, we ate only old biscuit,
reduced to powder and full of grubs and stinking from
the dirt which the rats had made on it when
eating the good biscuit, and we drank water that was
yellow and stinking. The men were so hungry that if
any of them caught a rat, he could sell it
for a high price to someone who would eat it.

(12:58):
In fifteen thirty five, French explorer Jacques Cartier established a
fort across the Saint Charles River from the Iroquoisan village
of Stadacona that's near what's now Quebec City. That winter
was extremely harsh. Cardier's ships became ice bound. They were
not able to return to France's planned and when they

(13:18):
heard of an illness that was spreading through the indigenous population,
they tried to cut off contact with them, but then
that same illness started to spread through Cardier's own men.
In an account translated by Richard Hacklett, it's described as
this quote. Some did lose their strength and could not
stand on their feet. Then did their legs swell. Their

(13:39):
sinnow's shrink as black as any coal. Others also had
all their skins spotted with spots of blood of a
purple color. Then did ascend up to their ankles, knees, thighs, shoulders, arms,
and neck. Their mouth became stinking, their gums so rotten
that all the flesh did fall off, even to the
roots of the teeth, which also all fall out. About

(14:02):
the middle of February, of one hundredth and ten persons
that we were there were not ten whole. There were
already eight dead, and more than fifty six. And as
we saw it, passed all hope of recovery, so at
some point Cardier went for a walk and encountered Domagaya,
who was the son of Doncona, who was the chief
of Stadacona. Domagaya told Cardier about a treatment for this disease,

(14:27):
which was to prepare a tea from the leaves of
a local tree. This tree is not conclusively identified today,
but the most likely candidate is the eastern white cedar,
whose leaves always contain some vitamincy but have a whole
lot more of it in the new growth that comes
out in the early spring. Although at least twenty five
men in the fort died of scurvy, this cure was

(14:50):
effective for the ones who survived. There is a court,
of course, a whole lot more to this story outside
the part about scurvy. Cardier had actually abducted Domagaia and
his brother on his earlier voyage and forced them to
accompany him back to France, bringing them back to North
America with him in fifteen thirty five, and at the
end of his second voyage, Cardier abducted them for a

(15:12):
second time, along with their father and seven other indigenous people.
All but one of them died before Cardier returned to
North America for his third voyage in fifteen forty one.
Probably the most dramatic and notorious outbreak of scurvy at
sea was during George Anson's four year voyage around the world,
which started in seventeen forty. Britain was at war with Spain,

(15:37):
and because of the war, Anson had a serious labor shortage.
Even press gangs, who were abducting men off the street
to force them to serve in the Royal Navy could
not provide him with enough men for his fleet. Eventually,
this gap was filled with men from Chelsea Hospital, most
of whom were sick, injured, or elderly to the point

(15:57):
that they weren't able to just leave on their own.
When they got released from the hospital. The people who
did have the capacity to just walk away did that,
so he was left with like the oldest, sickest men
from the hospital. And then there were delays in outfitting
the ships, and the crews ate nothing but ships rations

(16:18):
for months as they waited, and while there were treatments
for scurvy on board, none of them contained much, if
any vitamin C, so they did not actually work for
the most part. They were also really unpleasant, like drinking
a bunch of straight vinegar. I like vinegar and vinegary things,
but the idea of just gulping down a whole bunch
of it does not sound great to me. Hard pass.

(16:42):
Once they finally got underway, they sailed through terrible storms
and were blown off course by April of seventeen forty one.
Most of the men who had survived those treacherous seas
had then developed scurvy. By June, they were down from
six ships to only three, with only three high hundred
and thirty five survivors out of about thirteen hundred original crew.

(17:05):
Finally they reached the Wan Fernandez Islands off the coast
of Chile. These were home to plenty of fresh fruits
and vegetables, and as the ships took on fresh provisions
and the men ate these foods, they gradually began to recover.
But because their conditions were so dire, when they started
getting more vitamin C into their bodies, it actually took

(17:25):
more than a month before men stopped dying of scurvy.
Anson's dwindling fleet was struck by scurvy again in the
Pacific Ocean in the summer of seventeen forty two, so
obviously after they had run out of the fresh provisions
that they brought on board. When his two remaining ships
finally got to China, there were only two hundred and

(17:46):
twenty seven of the original crew still living. In spite
of that, they managed to capture a Spanish galleon that
was bound for Manila on June twentieth of seventeen forty three,
and then with a holy one hundred and forty five
five of the original men, they made it back to Britain.
Because they had captured the Spanish galleon, they were treated

(18:06):
as heroes, with treasures from the galleon paraded through the
streets of London, and Anson named first Lord of the
Admiralty in seventeen fifty one. At this point, I mean,
it might seem a little weird for the person who
was in charge when all of these people died to
then become the first Lord of the Admiralty. But at
this point European naval officials had long seen scurvy as

(18:30):
an almost inevitable side effect of sending men out to
sea for long periods, and they really did not know
what was going on with this disease. They did not
know about vitamin C, or about vitamins at all. It
would be more than one hundred and fifty more years
before Casimir Funk would coin the word vitamin to describe
specific chemical substances that the body needed to survive. They

(18:54):
did not know about collagen either. The molecular structure of
collagen was not discovered until the Night teaen thirties. Complicating
all of this, diets that lacked vitamin C often lacked
other essential nutrients as well, and outbreaks of scurvy frequently
happened alongside outbreaks of contagious diseases, so it wasn't always

(19:14):
clear exactly what disease was at work, and often multiple
conditions were getting lumped together and described as scurvy. So
over the centuries, various people noticed that an assortment of
foods seemed to cure scurvy. Sometimes they did put that
discovery in writing, but it took a really long time
before navies started consistently keeping effective treatments for it on ships.

(19:40):
This was not just a matter of people forgetting that
citrus fruits cured scurvy, though it is definitely described that
way sometimes like people kind of frame it as people
in the past were great, big dummies who just kept
forgetting that all they needed was oranges. In hindsight, it
is really easy to see that the things that treated

(20:00):
scurvy effectively all have vitamin C in them. But at
the time, not only did people not know why any
of those things actually worked, but their explanations for why
they worked were totally off base. So as people tried
to come up with cures that were easier to keep
fresh on ships than fruits and vegetables are, it just

(20:20):
kept going down the completely wrong track. Often James Lynde
is the one who gets credit for solving this scurvy problem,
but it's of course history, so that means it's way
more complicated than that, And we're going to get into
all of that after we pause for a sponsor break.

(20:44):
For hundreds of years, medicine in Europe rested on the
idea of humors, and this drew from Greek physicians and
philosophers like Galen and Hippocrates. It also appears in the
work of Persian polymath Ebn Sina. Similar concepts are part
of traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda as well, and in

(21:04):
terms of the understanding of scurvy and much of Europe.
For hundreds of years it was believed to be due
to putrefaction of the humors, and then that puture faction
was made worse by bad food, bad air, bad hygiene,
or sometimes just laziness, and there were a lot of
people who figured out something that worked to treat this.

(21:26):
In fifteen seventy four, Balduinus Roncius wrote about oranges curing
scurvy in Dutch sailors. In the late sixteenth century, Enrich
Euer wrote about cloudberry's treating scurvy in Norse sailors. In
sixteen seventeen, John Woodall published a reference book called The
Surgeon's Mate, or Military and Domestique Surgery Discovering Faithfully and

(21:51):
plainly YE method. An order of ye Surgeon's chest, Ye
uses of the instruments, the virtues and operations of YE medicines,
with the exact cures of wounds made by gunshot and
otherwise as namely wounds, appost fumes, ulcers, fistulas, fractures, dislocations
with the most easy and safest ways of amputation or dismembering.

(22:15):
The cures of the scurvy of Ye, fluxes of you,
belly of ucolic and Iliaca Passio of Tenasimus and exotus Ana,
and of the calend Tour with a Treatise of Ye
Cure of ye Plague, published for the service of His
Master and of the Commonwealth by John Woodhall, mister in surgery.

(22:37):
As that very long title mentioned, it had an entire
section on scurvy and its treatment. I think we should
bring back the days where we basically include the index
in the title. Yeah. Well, I looked at the table
of contents for it, and at one point I had
the table of contents for what the section on scurvy

(22:58):
included in here, But it was really like scurvy, it's description,
it's treatment. Yeah. What All's descriptions of scurvy are similar
to what we talked about earlier in the show. And
as for its cure, he wrote that quote as a
famous writer named Johannes Ekteus in a treatise Discorbuto a
Firmus consisted chiefly in four things, namely in opening obstructions,

(23:21):
evacuating the offending humors, in altering the property of them,
and in comforting and corroborating the parts late diseased. What
All stresses the need to keep the cruise quarters clean
and sweet, with as much high quality, comfortable food as possible.
But if someone does get scurvy, they should be bled
and given some quote pills of euphorbium or otherwise pibula

(23:45):
ruffy or cambosia. And then after that some spoon meat
or some oatmeal or egg yolk, or a broth of
currants and other fruit, or some sugar or spices, or
some barley water, or some oil of vitrey which is
sulfuric acid, or putting some dried wormwood in the patient's drink.

(24:06):
And then quote further, the surgeon or his mate must
not fail to persuade the governor or purser in all
places where they touched in the Indies, and may have
it to provide themselves of juice of oranges, limes or lemons,
and at bantham of tamarinds. In the surgeon's mate. Woodall
makes lots of references to citrus fruit, but he's really

(24:28):
focused on when cruiser in places where those fruits grow,
because quote, the sea surgeon shall do little good at
sea with them, neither will they endure. Yeah, he had
stuff about citrus fruit in here, but it was really
about when they were on land. And he also included
so many other things that would not have been effective
at all. Oil of vitriol was a very common scurvy treatment.

(24:51):
It was literally sulfuric acid that was not helpful. In
sixteen twenty two, Sir Richard Hawkins, who called scurvy quote
the plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners,
wrote that sour lemons and oranges could treat it. In
sixteen thirty five, Ambrosius Rhodius defended and published the first

(25:12):
Scandinavian doctoral thesis, and it was on scurvy. It described
treating scurvy with scurvy grass, common chickweed, watercress, mustard plants,
and the cloud berries that we mentioned earlier on in
the show. Ambrosius Roodius did seem to understand that scurvy
was connected to nutrition, but his ideas on how that

(25:32):
worked were a little bit fuzzy. It was connected to
the idea of canceling out opposites. Sure. By the late
sixteen hundreds, people were using the word anti scorbutic to
describe things they believed to be useful against scurvy. Dutch
physician Johannes Bachscham used the term to describe fresh fruits

(25:53):
and vegetables in seventeen thirty four. Also in the eighteenth century,
Baron Gehard von Sweeden talked about scarcity of greens and
vegetables as contributing to scurvy, but he also attributed it
to quote noisome vapors arising from marshy grounds and stagnating waters,
in action, drinking of corrupted and stagnating waters, the use

(26:15):
of salted and smoked flesh and fish, damp and low lodgings,
as well as sorrow, nostalgia and homesickness. According to von Sweeten,
treatment for scurvy involved quote, correcting the impure waters and
also purging. He also made dietary recommendations quote the food

(26:35):
should be broth with shrvil sorrel, spinach, lettuce, hodie, suckery, cabbage,
especially red cabbage, young nettle, buds and tops, or any
other sort of tender herbage boiled in it. The preference
to be given to those easiest to come at. Fruit
quite ripe used moderately always produces a good effect. But

(26:57):
if neither fruit nor greens can be pre cured, the
patient must have his broth with barley oats or rice.
He may eat likewise a little veal or fowl, but
it must be moderately. So a lot of people had
noted fresh fruits and vegetables, including citrus fruits, as a
treatment for scurvy by the time James Lynde had entered

(27:18):
the British Royal Navy as a surgeon's mate in seventeen
thirty nine. He became a full surgeon in seventeen forty six,
and he was aboard the HMS Salisbury in seventeen forty
seven when there was an outbreak of scurvy. Lind did
an experiment which is sometimes described as the world's first
controlled clinical trial. He selected twelve sailors, all of whom

(27:41):
had scurvy that he described as being at a similar
point of progression, and he paired them up, and he
gave each pair a different treatment over the course of
two weeks. These were treatments that already existed for scurvy,
except for seawater, which was apparently more of a placebo.
Don't drink seawater. It's not a good plan. But these

(28:03):
these pears were each given a quart of cider per day,
twenty five drops of elixir of vitriol three times a day,
half a pint of seawater a day, a nutmeg sized
paste of garlic, mustard seed, horseradish, balsam of peru and
gum myrr three times a day, two spoonfuls of vinegar

(28:26):
three times a day, or two oranges and one lemon
each day. I mean, I might opt for the nutmeg
sized paste of garlic, but that's just me. I mean,
it's I kind of do that. Anyway, the men who
were given cider improved somewhat because of the way cider
was made at the time, it probably did have some

(28:48):
vitamin C in it. But the two men who got
oranges and lemons improved so dramatically that they were determined
to be well after six days, and from that point
they actually helped take care of the other. While he
was writing about this, lend reference to Balduinus Rossius writing
about oranges curing Dutch sailors from like two hundred years before,

(29:09):
and he said, quote here, indeed is the remarkable and
authentic proof of the great efficacy of juice of lemons
against this disease. But these fruits have this particular advantage
above any theory that can be prepared for trial that
their experienced virtues have stood the test of near two
hundred years. Lynde left the Navy in seventeen forty eight.

(29:32):
In seventeen fifty three, he wrote a Treatise of the Scurvy,
containing an inquiry into the nature, causes, and cure of
that disease, together with a critical and chronological view of
what has been published on this subject. And while this
did include the sentence quote oranges and lemons were the
most effectual remedies for this distemperate sea, that was only

(29:53):
one tiny part of a four hundred page work that
talked about a lot of other stuff related to scurvy.
For example, well, he did not think there was a
direct cause and effect relationship between the fruit and the scurvy.
He actually thought scurvy was a digestive disease that was
caused by blocked sweat glands, and that the fruit and
to a lesser extent, the cider were all clearing those blockages,

(30:16):
and he also thought that other blockage clearing substances could
potentially have the same effect. Lynde also recognized that you
cannot really just keep citrus fruits fresh on a ship
for a lengthy sea voyage, so he recommended concentrating the
juice into a rob, but because of the way that
ROB was concentrated, the end result would not have actually

(30:39):
contained much vitamin C at all. I'm I'm thinking of
people who drink orange flavored drink and make jokes about
not getting scurvy, and I'm like, there's not really much orangeeness. Yeah.
Over the next decades, other people writing about citrus fruits
and scurvy attributed their effectiveness to their being a stimulant,

(31:02):
or because they were full of a vital air that
was leeching out of sailor's bodies at sea. Irish doctor
David McBride tested maltwort, which he believed provided fixed air
as a scurvy treatment, although his results were clouded by
the fact that he also gave some of his patients
citrus fruit. Another person who claimed to conquer scurvy was

(31:24):
Captain James Cook, and although there were some scurvy outbreaks
on his voyages, there weren't any deaths because of it.
His preferred scurvy preventatives were portable soup, which was basically
bullyon powder, which I am calling portable soup from now on,
as well as malt and sauerkraut, and of those three

(31:45):
things only the sauer kraut would have contained much vitamin
C as long as they were eating it raw. He
also insisted on bringing fresh provisions onto the ship at
every possible stop, which would have kept them supplied more
fresh fruits and vegetables, and he also insisted on keeping
the ship really clean, which would have helped slow the

(32:06):
spread of communicable diseases. Finally, after hundreds of years of
various people suggesting that citrus might play some part in
curing scurvy, in seventeen ninety five, Gilbert Blaine got the
British Royal Navy to issue lemon juice to every sailor.
This work to Britain's advantage during the Napoleonic Wars, and

(32:26):
during the nineteenth century, more and more European explorers and
naval officials started stressing the need for lemon or lime juice,
or for some kind of fresh vegetables on board. In
eighteen twenty one, William Perry's expedition to the Arctic took
quote a shallow tray filled with mold on which to
grow mustard and cress, and their party's only death from

(32:49):
scurvy was an officer who refused to eat them. Sir
John Franklin's expedition in eighteen forty five kept scurvy at
bay for twenty seven months with lemon juice, the scurvy
outbreaks beginning only after that supply of lemon juice ran out.
For the most part, the British Navy had started out
using lemon juice made from lemons from the Mediterranean to

(33:11):
prevent scurvy. In the mid nineteenth century, they instead started
using limes from the Caribbean islands of Monsarrat and Bermuda.
Part of the rational here was the idea that lime
juice was more acidic and would thus be more effective
at clearing out purported blackages. Was also because Britain had
claimed those islands as territories, so there was they could

(33:34):
get things from them that was a free asset to
them in their minds, to them is the very very
important part of that phrasing. But scurvy outbreaks kept happening
in other places besides European navies. Scurvy was a problem
during the Great Famine that started in Ireland in eighteen
forty five, which would later lead people to incorrectly conclude

(33:57):
that it was connected to potassium deficiency. When pasturization was
introduced in the late nineteenth century, there was an outbreak
of scurvy in babies whose families were wealthy enough to
be feeding them pasteurized milk. In the early twentieth century,
researchers at the Lister Institute in London realized that guinea

(34:17):
pigs could develop a condition that seemed identical to scurvy.
As we mentioned up at the top of the show,
guinea pigs also cannot synthesize their own vitamin c axel
Holst and Theodore Frolick discovered that if the guinea pigs
were fed only grains, they became ill, but then if
they were given cabbage or lemon juice, they got better.

(34:38):
They published their work on this in nineteen oh seven,
and then five years later in nineteen twelve, was when
Casimir Funk coined the term vitamin, which later morphed into vitamin.
At this point, the Lister Institute was doing a lot
of research into nutritional deficiencies, with many of the researchers
being women. At the institute, Harriet Chick and Margaret Hume

(35:01):
started identifying more and more foods that had anti scorbutic properties,
including cabbage, onions, carrots, fruit juices, and potatoes. Alice Henderson
Smith also researched exactly which fruits had historically been used
in British navy treatments and their efficacy. By the nineteen twenties,

(35:21):
it was clear that scurvy was a deficiency in a
specific nutrient, but nobody had been able to isolate the
nutrient itself. Then, in nineteen twenty eight, Albert zent Gyorgi
isolated a compound in Paprica that he named hexuronic acid,
but it was later renamed a sorbic acid because of

(35:41):
its whole anti scorbutic effect. In nineteen thirty seven, he
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine quote
for his discoveries in connection with the biological combustion processes,
with special reference to vitamin C and the catalysis of
fumaric acid. Today, it is of course a knowledge that
vitamin C prevents scurvy, but it can still develop anytime

(36:04):
people cannot get enough vitamin C. Yeah, it's uh. I
read lots of articles about various outbreaks and various places
for everything from like refugee camps where there just are
not adequate provisions, to like fad diets where people have
tried to cut all fruit out of their diet, like

(36:26):
just all over the place. And you know, as we
said at the top of the show, people who have
whether it's a physiological condition or a psychological condition, who
either aren't able to eat or aren't able to absorb
nutrients from their food, Lots of cases still happen today.

(36:47):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
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