Real pirates don't get

Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail

by Stephen R. Bown

Fascinating book about a very grim topic.  His detailed descriptions about what scurvy does to the body turned my stomach--I had to start skimming them.  But the saddest thing was that we discovered the cure before we understood the cause.  Even though the cure was discovered and re-discovered over the years, it was always lost again. Experts--often without any practical experience in the conditions of seafaring life--insisted in making up bogus cures based on wrong guesses about the cause.

Humanity's insistence on "ancestor worship" confounds and confuses me to this day. (e.g., the Supreme Court and the Constitution--have we not learned anything in 200 years?  I say we have--a lot.)  But in the case of 17th and 18th century medicine, apparently not much.  They were still blindly obedient to Hippocrates' theories of humoral imbalance.  Blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile had to be in balance to achieve health.  An imbalance could be corrected by draining to overage or by consumption of cold and dry or hot and wet medicines.  None of which, incidentally, contained vitamin C. 

Mankind also has an incurable propensity for confusing symptoms with causes.  I wonder if the whole theory that high cholesterol in the blood was "caused" by high cholesterol in the diet was simply the result of backward reasoning?  Thus,

1. By the eighteenth century, the theorists had succeeded in obfuscating with a bewildering fog of shifting hypotheses a problem that should have been, and indeed was at one time, solved by basic observation and common sense.

To argue from observable facts was thus revolutionary, when it finally occurred:

1. This attitude placed the horse firmly before the cart, the facts before the conclusions--something that had been the reverse for centuries.