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.