Age of Invention: Plague of the Sea

antonhowes.substack.com

31 points·jger15··4 comments

Maciej Cegłowski has an excellent post that goes into a bit more depth on this story of how the cure for scurvy was found, unwittingly lost, and refound:

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

> Toward the end of the nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth, legendary Arctic explorers like Fridtjof Nansen still swore by useless remedies like unspoilt meat.

Good article, but this line stuck out. Meat can be a useful source of vitamin C. The way people have survived in the arctic for thousands of years is, at least in part, by eating raw meat. Raw, for the same reason eating raw vegetables is preferable: vitamin C is fragile. That it should be unspoiled meat goes without saying. So, whether it worked in particular cases or not, it is definitely not a useless remedy.

Here's a reference for the Inuit getting their vitamin C from sources like fish, birds, caribou, seals, whales, etc:

http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic32-2-135.pdf

Unspoilt isn't raw though, those explorers were convinced that scurvy was a form of food poisoning caused by eating spoilt meat. They further this point later in the article by mentioning even when they figured out it was vitamin C they thought it prevented what caused scurvy not that a lack of vitamin C caused scurvy.

I'm surprised there was no mention of sauerkraut, I know it was a great way to keep preserved vitamin C on board a ship that would last for a while.

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