expedition

Over at Idle Words, a fascinating story about the history of scurvy, and how the cure, which was basically discovered in 1747, was somehow not well-known even as late as Robert Falcon Scott\’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole. Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be...

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