Comment by laser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laser | Hacker News Reader

My favorite part was on the last page, which I’ll include below as I assume most won’t read to the end.

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.

There's a near identical tale behind scurvy. Scurvy, most of everybody now knows, is caused simply by a deficiency of vitamin C. But this is something that took thousands of years to grasp, with millions of people falling victim to it in the interim. During the age of sail losing large chunks of your crew, largely due to scurvy, was just part of life. Part of the reason the cure was so difficult to discover is because it sounds folksy or homeopathic. As scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C, a simple way of preventing it is eating fresh fruits or meats.

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!

https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm which has been submitted here previously is an (as far as I know) great telling of that story, a real Science Is Hard parable.

A cocktail that I quite enjoy is the gimlet [0], it apparently was possibly invented to encourage sailors to drink lime juice.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimlet_(cocktail)#Etymology

>>A cocktail that I quite enjoy is the gimlet [0], it apparently was possibly invented to encourage sailors to drink lime juice.

...things people do to make sure they don't get scurvy ;)

But it's often made with Rose's Lime Juice, a concentrate, which AFAICT contains no vitamin C.

Reminds me of how the British stationed in 19th century India used to use quinine to ward off malaria. Apparently in its raw form it's incredibly bitter so the soldiers started to mix it with water and sugar and voila - tonic water was born.

Some bright spark added gin and the rest is history...

Close, but it's really the gin and tonic that was born out of getting sailors to drink quinine in the tonic water:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_and_tonic#History

And yes, having taken quinine pills for malaria it is very bitter and unpleasant.

It’s bitter because it’s actually quite poisonous, and your tongue is warming you about that. Dave Arnold’s excellent Liquid Intelligence has a section on making your own tonic with pure quinine powder, and he admonishes the reader to mix with a blender, because an ubcombined chunk of pure quinine could actually hospitalize someone if it ended up in their drink.

Tonic water made with actual quinine rather than the synthetic stuff is great. It seems preferable to the pills, though I suspect you’d have to drink a lot.

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...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_water

I prefer my mixed drinks with tonic over any other mixer. As you note, off the shelf tonic has very little quinine nowadays. When I had to take the pills I was headed to an area with a known malaria risk.

In general the Royal Navy added lime juice to whichever alcohol they issued to sailors as daily rations. Usually it was rum but could be other booze if the rum ran out. Officers would watch to ensure each man drank his dose instead of trading it away.

Was there no source of Vitamin C that was cheaper, less perishable, and more easily available in Northern Europe in all seasons, than citrus? I don't know how exotic lemons were at the time, but I'd guess loading up on lots of citrus in a Northern European port could be rather expensive?

For Northern Europe at that time I would think that kale would be the best source. You can harvest fresh kale for most of the year. No idea how the vitamin c holds up when you dry it. I'm unsure if sea buckthorn was growing in Northern Europe at that time, but if it was it would be a near perfect source, save for the trouble of picking them. Today you could eat Rosehip too, but that plant is so invasive that it needs to be seriously kept at bay.

Sauerkraut. Any kind of fermented vegetable would do but you really need something with relatively high vitamin c content and it’s really easy to destroy.

Yes, sauerkraut.

Remember that, without understanding the chemistry, running an experiment was difficult. Aside from the expense, I doubt people would be enthused about doing trials of alternative foods when people would get scurvy if the food turned out not to work as well.

> without understanding the chemistry, running an experiment was difficult

Also, without the scientific method, the concept of an experiment could look to an outsider like recklessness (or buffoonery).

Fermented cucumbers are used in winter as source of vitamine C all the way from river Oder to Kunming in China. As are other pickles like betrot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickled_cucumber

In warmer climate like Mediteranian children were given wine in winter for that reason.

Raw (or lightly-cooked) meat also has a lot of vitamin C.

Scurvygrass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlearia_officinalis)

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

Ironically limes have less vitamin C content than lemons so don't do as well at combating scurvy.

The British used limes as they had easier/controlled access to them than lemons.

Worse than this: they switched from lemons to limes, assuming that they were equivalent (and cheaper). And then came to doubt the theory that citrus prevented scurvy as some pre-modern pre-scientific relic.

Even more ironically, sargassum seaweed floats on the ocean, and is higher in vitamin C than citrus fruit.

And for both scurvy and beriberi, the cure was already known, but ignored because not scientific. From leoc's excellent link:

> 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.

What about organ meats? That's piqued my interest

\piqued. Very high nutritional density, but these days everyone prefers lean muscle meat, and are put off by organ meats (sadly, myself included). People used to eat them routinely, e.g.: lambs fry, steak and kidney pie, lamb's brains, tripe (lungs), heart.

Tripe is stomach. Lung is not always consumed, but is sometimes. Scottish haggis and related scandi dishes are made from "the pluck" which means lungs, liver/fry and tongue.

Tripe isn't lung, but stomach.

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.

Liver in particular used to be something of a comfort food staple in at least parts of the US. I'd encourage people to use fresh veal liver if available rather than the frozen beef liver that may be in the back of a freezer in a supermarket somewhere.

I also like veal kidneys and sweetbreads but rarely see them.

One way to try sweetbread is to see if your local Mexican market with a food court has "mollejas" tacos.

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.

Every now and then you'll see them on a restaurant menu and you can sometimes get them from a butcher (although TBH they're probably more prep work than is worth it for me). But, yeah, pretty hard to come by.

I in particular am interested in the vitamin K2, which comes almost exclusively from organ meats. If I had to bet on one nutrient that’ll get the “duh you should’ve been eating X” in a century or two, it’d be K2.

Thanks for the heads up. Clicky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_K2

> You can withhold external vitamin C from a mouse for years and you'll never see scurvy.

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.

I’d argue that the health of the sailors, who were in a sense the lowest of the low was not a concern for a long time. Ships were disgusting — you could smell a military ship coming.

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.

It seems to me that one of the early French expeditions to Canada was saved by the local showing them to make a drink with evergreen needles.

I really don't think the problem was "belligerence towards pre-scientific human knowledge" - the problem was that the Army did not want that knowledge because it came from the navy, and used "it doesn't meet scientific standards" as an excuse to ignore it.

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.

Yes, but read up a bit:

> 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.

My favorite demonstration of the value of science is scurvy.

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 great write up on part of that history:

https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

Reminds me a little of this joke:

  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."

It's funny, because it's true. We went weeks in the same clothes without much more than the wet wipes packaged with MREs. But the moral of the story is to wash up when you can.

That joke comes in many flavors doesn't it? I know a version with 3 Engineers, one from MS, one from Oracle and one from Intel. Essentially, this one: http://www.jokes.net/threeengineers.htm but with different companies.

My guess, the joke is as old as time and there's variations of it with different nationalities instead of professions.

I heard it with universities. Harvard and Yale, I think.

Said by Churchill, Eton vs Harrow.

The version I always used is "Difference between a university and a tech school"

How do you tell a white collar worker from a blue collar worker?

The white collar worker washes his hands after going to the bathroom stall, the blue collar worker before.

The two training ships seemed like pretty suggestive experimental evidence. Just not fully controlled laboratory evidence.

In purely philosophical terms, you could say it's "scientific." But... in practice science is an institution as much as it is a method. In that sense "unscientific" means that something doesn't come from the scientific institution/culture.. regardless of who is on what side of a Karl Popper test of science.

I would say that on very practical terms, one could call it scientific, taking advantage of a situation that made possible an trial that could not have been approved as a fully-controlled clinical experiment, given the official opposition to Takaki's ideas.

Takski's hypothesis also met Popper's criterion for falsifiability, and the Tsukuba could have suffered similar beri-beri rates as did the Ryujo.

Quick side note.

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.

There were similar rivalries in Germany (e.g. Gestapo vs. SS vs. Wehrmacht) -- different state rackets competing with each other is a common feature of fascism.

The Allies were not immune to this either, especially the Soviets (NKVD vs military). In the democratic countries it was more on the individual level, with certain powerful people fighting to get their way (i.e. MacArthur).

From 1936 onwards, the Gestapo was entirely subordinate to the SS, as were most of the police organizations in Germany. There was no rivalry between it and the SS, nor with the Wehrmacht.

The Gestapo becoming subordinate to the SS was the result of said rivalry, so it's odd to present that as evidence that there was no rivalry.

The Gestapo was born of rivalry between the SS and the SA. The Gestapo WAS the police arm of the SS, just as the SD was a part of the SS.

Bad science is the same as bad pre-scientific knowledge. I don't think anyone is for the utter rejection of pre-scientific knowledge, we just want to know why and if it works. If it's found not to, I don't think it holds any intrinsic value simply because it's traditional. Keep the aspirin, reject the humors.

You can often read it on HN actually. Quite often you'll see people offering word-of-mouth solution to a problem, and the comments following will dismiss it for being pseudo-science, request "link to studies", etc.

Too much of good thing can be a bad thing.

I think that goes back to the "why and how it works". A home remedy has a neutral value to me until I have evidence, and my own anecdotal evidence doesn't have a lot of value to me - when I have a cold eating a gallon tub of ice cream would make me feel better for a time, but it doesn't actually help anything and is generally a bad idea.

Next time you have a cold, I recommend sleeping all day. It's worked great for me!

That's because word-of-mouth is very capable of transmitting abject nonsense and fantasy. If you're going to be taking some medicine, you should be sure it isn't, and the way to do that is with thorough study & evaluation.

Not the point. The point is that we are the opposite of the facebook mum. She believes anything that is posted without evidence, while we don't dare to even try something without 4 white papers.

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.

I am not promoting them, nor would I. Obviously, this is a mixed community, and you cannot paint it with such a broad brush.

We also have too many "essential oils" and homeopathy from world-of-mouth. It cuts both ways.

Yes, and this Firefox things was not serious when it was called Phoenix. And meditation ? Hippie crap. Ah, this fasting stuff is dangerous grandma shenanigans.

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.

The question is - does meditation make your life better in the same ratio that bleach enemas and black tar treatments for cancer make your life worse?

I'm assuming the average HN reader can assess the risk of trying something unusual out. Since we are, after all, talking about this community.

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