Sea Sick: Lime Juice and Scurvy

With an apparently unremarkable eighteenth-century glass bott le
as its starting point, Sea Sick: Lime Juice and Scurvy explores
the history of scurvy, its symptoms, causes and the fi ght against it.
Conservative estimates indicate that the disease took the lives of
more than two million seafarers between 1500 and 1800, and it has
been suggested that scurvy was responsible for more deaths at sea
than storms, shipwreck and all other diseases combined during the
eighteenth century alone.
Curator Lucy Dale breaks the story of scurvy into four parts,
considering fi rst the symptoms of the disease and its psychological
and physical manifestations, before exploring it in a specifi cally
maritime context through notable voyages and individuals who
were aff licted.
Dale then looks at the oft en haphazard and ineff ective
interventions and eff orts to fi nd a cure. She highlights the pioneering
experiment by James Lind, Captain Cook's apparent promotion of
malt wort, the provisioning of lime juice to the fl eet of the Royal
Navy and fi nally the resurgence of scurvy in the Arctic and Antarctic
expeditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
concluding chapter outlines the discovery of vitamin C in the 1930s
by Hungarian scientist Albert Szent-Györgi, who received the Nobel
Prize in recognition of his work.