11.29
James Lind knew citrus-rich fruits cured scurvy but never told sailors to eat them. Why?

­­Last week I was re-reading Druin Burch’s Taking the Medicine when I came across a startling fact: 18th century doctor James Lind found sailors who ate oranges and lemons didn’t contract scurvy. But without the concept of vitamins — let alone vitamin C — he never fully accepted citrus-rich fruit cured scurvy. Sailors carried on needlessly dying for another fifty years before the British Navy verified the correct treatment.

At first, I was confused why Lind never trusted the link between scurvy and citrus. He didn’t need to understand the biological causes of scurvy to see that citrus-rich fruits worked to treat it. Couldn’t he just follow the evidence?

The more I read about 18th century medicine, the easier it was to defend him. Bloodletting was common. Miasma or “bad air” theory was the dominant explanation for just about every illness and disease. Even if Lind explicitly advocated citrus as a scurvy treatment, the medical establishment was too deeply rooted in its own beliefs – despite the fact more British sailors died from scurvy than wartime activity.

(If you work in a large company, I bet you can appreciate his position. Perhaps you’ve had data showing that your idea works but you couldn’t explain why, so you pushed it aside and accepted the status quo.)

Taking the Medicine is a history of medicine. But it reads like a story about authority propping up bad ideas and ignoring innovation. When I finished my re-read I made a small pledge to treat new ideas like a budding romantic interest: defend them but not blindly, fall in love with them but not too quickly.

In 1772, years after Lind first published his research, he said it is “not probable” that “a remedy for scurvy will ever be discovered.” He was a medical pioneer. Yet this line almost sounds like a hopelessly single man who gave up on love before experiencing one of its key insights: when something works you don’t explain why.

You just keep pursuing it.