The Scurvy Story

In the annals of the disease, two men are mostly credited with discovering a cure: James Lind and Gilbert Blane. While citrus fruits had long been anecdotally treated as a cure, so were a whole host of other naturopathic remedies, and it fell to the young surgeon’s mate James Lind to design a now-famous test of various remedies. Lind, who enlisted at the age of twenty-three without much formal medical training, became obsessed with scurvy and its effects, and in 1747 gathered together twelve sailors with scurvy, which he ordered fed the same meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then divided them into six groups, administering various known cures for scurvy to each group: · One quart of hard cider· Twenty-five drops of elixir vitriol· Two spoonfuls of vinegar· Half a pint of sea water· Two oranges and one lemon· A medicinal paste made up of garlic, mustard see, balsam of Peru, dried radish root and gum myrrh; along with a drink of barley-water with tamarind, and finally crème of tartar as a laxative It took only six days for those on citrus fruits to recover, though the hard cider group also saw some limited improvements in symptoms. Those who gargled the elixir vitriol had cleaner mouths and gums, but otherwise had not improved much. Lind saw no improvement in the sea water, vinegar, or medicinal-paste-and-tamarind-water groups. He concluded: “oranges and lemons were the most effectual remedies for this distemper at sea.â€...
Source: PharmaGossip - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs