Imagine somebody told you you could prevent some terrible and frequently fatal disease, that's spread worldwide, by eating limes. And this was already well within the age of formalized science and medicine. This was also further confounded by the fact that the vitamin content of things such as lemon juice degrades over time in storage, and even more rapidly in certain types of storage. And so some scientific experiments to test its effectiveness were inadvertently hamstringing themselves. It's made even more fun by the fact that humans need external sources of vitamin c while some common lab animals such as mice and rats do not - and internally make their own. You can withhold external vitamin C from a mouse for years and you'll never see scurvy.
Its ironic that I think this particular tale has slowly been lost to many in society, even though we have so many direct references to it. For instance the slang for a Brit as a limey came from the fact that the British Navy was the first to start dosing their sailors with lime, with tremendously positive affects to show for it. Maybe the biggest one is vitamin C itself. Vitamin C is now called ascorbic acid. But when it was first discovered it was known as hexuronic acid. So huge was the effect of scurvy it was renamed for its discovered anti-scorbutic (against scurvy) effect. Ascorbic was just a shortening of anti-scorbutic. And this happened as recently as the 1930s!
Withholding vitamin C from a mouse's diet for a few years results in a 99% mortality rate. Although it's the same for the control group.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimlet_(cocktail)#Etymology
Some bright spark added gin and the rest is history...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_and_tonic#History
And yes, having taken quinine pills for malaria it is very bitter and unpleasant.
Edit: The WHO suggest treating severe drug resistant malaria with 500mg of quinine orally every 8 hours. A 1 litre bottle of tonic water should not contain more than 83mg according to the FDA. Drinking 6 litres every 8 hours is a bit much. https://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/Jh2922e/2.5.2.html#Jh...
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
...things people do to make sure they don't get scurvy ;)
> But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost.
What other folklore do we ignore at our peril? One is organ meats.
As an aside: if you ever visit the Balkans (including Hungary and Romania), definitely try Tripe Soup. It's a local delicacy and it's fantastic.
I also like veal kidneys and sweetbreads but rarely see them.
Otherwise I have no idea how the average American will encounter it. Seems super old timey.
I also love buying those large packs of chicken hearts and browning/carmelizing them in a pan.
As early as Vasco de Gama people were aware of the power of citrus to stop scurvy — they may not have known why, but they were aware.
With the British, there was an ROI to consider as the supply of sailors were tight, and they had attrition due to things like malaria as well.
The British used limes as they had easier/controlled access to them than lemons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickled_cucumber
In warmer climate like Mediteranian children were given wine in winter for that reason.
Also, without the scientific method, the concept of an experiment could look to an outsider like recklessness (or buffoonery).
Kept many people alive who had been marooned over the winter in Svalbard and other places in the Arctic. Also grows in cooler climates in Europe
You see the same in lots of discussions, where people make a claim and, when presented with evidence to the contrary, reject it because it's too small a sample - without holding their own claim to the same standards.
> For thousands of years, diseases had been seen through the lens of kampo, traditional Chinese herbal medicine. In kampo, disease was caused by heat or evils and was treated with herbal remedies.
> Sometimes the medicine was hokey, but other times it worked—as was the case with azuki and barley supplements for beriberi.
We can find, using science, if some folk medicine is hokey or useful. That is the key. Ground rhino horn still doesn't cure squat. Science fights "pre-scientific human knowledge" here in an uphill battle that will probably result in extinction of rhinos before this "pre-scientific human knowledge" is countered by science and reason.
Before scurvy was lastingly solved, the cure was discovered at least three distinct times within a century. In every case, the discoverer found a cure (like oranges, lemons, or raw meat) then made an untested assumption about the active agent (like acid, or avoiding tainted meat). They never tested those theories, but simply relied on circumstantial evidence and logic. The resulting treatments like lime juice and better food hygiene conformed to their theories, but did nothing to prevent scurvy.
From the present, it's easy to underestimate the power of the scientific method. We tend to think of it as what happens at universities, or as a format for writing a paper with a hypothesis, data, conclusions, and so on. The mere concept of testing one's theories seems too obvious to be a modern breakthrough. But that simple idea - that a theory shouldn't be accepted until its specific claim has been tested - was regularly ignored as late as World War One. It's hard to blame the Army for insisting on experimental evidence when "traditional medicine" and "statistical speculation" had been leaving soldiers with easily-curable scurvy only 20 years earlier.
A Marine and a sailor are taking a piss. The Marine goes to leave without washing up.
Sailor says, "In the Navy... ...they teach us to wash our hands."
The Marine turns to him and says: "In the Marines, they teach us not to piss on our hands."
The white collar worker washes his hands after going to the bathroom stall, the blue collar worker before.
Takski's hypothesis also met Popper's criterion for falsifiability, and the Tsukuba could have suffered similar beri-beri rates as did the Ryujo.
Japanese army and navy in WW2 were famously, well how should I say this, antagonistic against each other. They didn't share information with each other. Army even had own aircraft carriers to transport planes to distant islands. They couldn't or didn't want to rely on the Japanese navy.
Too much of good thing can be a bad thing.
It's especially funny given that meditation, psychedelic and open source software were all ridiculed concepts 30 years ago, and now we are promoting them in this very comment section.
We are going to much in the extreme, and missing on many very useful thing, just because the people introducing it to us are not scientific credible sources.
After 4,000 people died in the army from beriberi, the navy, which had eradicated the disease with better diet, criticized the army’s resistance to changing their diet. The article says:
‘Under attack by navy doctors, the Army Medical Bureau struck back with an article published under a pseudonym. “The army does not need traditional medicine, statistical speculation or 1,890-year-old theories to solve its beriberi problem,” the article stated. “It needs scientific knowledge based on experimental medicine.”’
After this, 26,000 more army men died from beriberi before the Emperor forced them to add barley to their rice...
As wonderful as scientific knowledge from experimental medicine is and has been, it seems this sort of belligerence towards pre-scientific human knowledge causes enormous damage that we’re still continuing to reckon with over a hundred years later. While ineffective traditional knowledge has caused plenty of unnecessary suffering too, it is often unwise to dismiss purely on the basis of having not yet been investigated with modern scientific rigor.