Scurvy, Science, and a boatload of FAIL

[treptoplax]

 If you haven't read Maciej Ceglowski's brilliant blog post from a couple months back  on the history of scurvy, you should go do it right now.

He got curious when reading about how Scurvy was a problem on so many of the Artic/Anartic expiditions at he beginning of the 20th century.  Wait, scurvy?  Yes, scurvy.

Now, I had been taught in school that

Comments

[tirinian]

Yeah, that's really nice.

[psychohist]

Rickets is making a comeback too.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028786_vitamin_D_deficiency.html

[psychohist]

Oh, and thanks for posting the link. I had heard the version "the British Navy figured out that lemons prevented scurvy, but then used limes to save money, which didn't work" - and that didn't square with the fact that limes also have vitamin C, if less. The detailed story cleared that up.

[treptoplax]

I really feel like there should be some point to this story, but I'm just not 100% sure what it is. Maybe it's just that people are really bad about experimental design; there's a lot of "X predicts Y, and Y, therefore X". Maybe it's that you can't actually design a proper experiment and understand what you control and what you vary at all without the right theoretical framework, and that, the hard part, experiments really don't help much with at all.

[merastra]

Cool article. Thanks for posting. I'd heard about scurvy making a comeback but didn't know why.

Also, it says to me that "humans are fallible", sometimes in sad ways.