Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail

Naval War College Review

Volume 58

Number 4 Autumn

Article 19

2005

Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a

Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of

the Age of Sail

Xavier K. Maruyama

Stephen R. Brown

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Recommended Citation

Maruyama, Xavier K. and Brown, Stephen R. (2005) "Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest

Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail," Naval War College Review: Vol. 58 : No. 4 , Article 19.

Available at: h=ps://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol58/iss4/19

might have been taken of concurrent

mutinous outbreaks prompted by the

same disinclination to fight Russians,

after fighting Germans, onboard British

warships off Archangel and among

American troops in the same region.

Homesickness and wartime restrictions

were among the reasons why Australian

tars defied their officers in 1919. The

Chilean navy’s revolt had its roots, as

had that of the men of Invergordon, in

the world economic depression, but the

Chilean navy’s revolt is notable as the

first naval mutiny crushed by air bom

bardment. Indian sailors in the waning

years of the British Raj staged lower-

deck protests against their officers; the

Canadian fleet developed “a tradition of

mutiny” in the 1930s; and the Chong-

qing mutiny off Manchuria in 1949

“played a pivotal role in the...found-

ing of the People’s Republic of China.”

Each story is briskly told, thoroughly

detailed, and accompanied by compre-

hensive source data. Perhaps fortu-

nately for riddle lovers, the question

persists—what is a mutiny? Many of the

Port Chicago fifty awaiting trial were

bewildered, believing that a mutiny in

volved a crew overthrowing its officers

and taking command of the ship.

High-level brass can be just as con

fused. At a Senate Armed Services

Committee hearing following the

Vietnam-era disturbances on the U.S.

aircraft carriers Constellation and Kitty

Hawk, the chairman asked Admiral

Elmo Zumwalt, then Chief of Naval

Operations, to define mutiny. Zumwalt

passed that one on to his lawyer. The

chairman wondered aloud if the Caine

mutiny of Herman Wouk’s novel,

though fictional, was not the real thing;

the CNO suggested that what happened

on the Bounty was a genuine mutiny.

This book mentions these troubles on

the American flattops only in passing.

Were all the episodes it covers truly

mutinies? Let the question rest. This is a

fine book, eminently readable, and as

definitive as any work can claim to be

on the still mysterious matter of

mutiny.

LEONARD F. GUTTRIDGE

Alexandria, Virginia

Brown, Stephen R. Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mar

iner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical

Mystery of the Age of Sail. Markham, Ont.:

Thomas Allen, 2003. 254pp. $23.95

The conquest of scurvy played as great a

role as any naval battle in the history of

England’s domination of the world dur-

ing the Age of Sail. Today we under-

stand that scurvy is a condition caused

by dietary deficiency. The typical menu

for a sailor in the eighteenth century

consisted of biscuits, salt beef, salt pork,

dried fish, butter, cheese, peas, and

beer—hardly sources of vitamin C. Ac

cording to the 1763 annual register tab

ulation of casualties among British

sailors in the Seven Years’ War with

France, of 184,999 men, 133,708 died

from disease, primarily scurvy, while

only 1,512 were killed in action. Such

numbers are hard to comprehend today.

Brown implies that America won its in

dependence because the ravages of this

disease prevented the British fleet from

maintaining an effective blockade. Only

a few years later, having conquered

scurvy, the same navy thwarted Napoleon

from mounting an invasion force and

sustained a blockade preventing the

French and Spanish from consolidating

their ships into an effective fleet.

158 NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW

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This book is a definitive history of

scurvy. It had been known among the

ancients, but its effects became truly

dreadful during the Age of Sail, when

ships would be at sea for months on

end. The beginnings of a concerted

search for its cure might be ascribed to

the ill-fated circumnavigation of the

world by George Anson in the years

1740–44. Five warships and one sloop

began the journey, but only one ship re

turned. Scurvy had felled so many men

that ships had had to be scuttled and

abandoned for lack of sufficient crews.

When Anson became First Lord of the

Admiralty, he encouraged scurvy re

search and made changes to shipboard

hygiene.

Three names stand out in the search for

a cure: James Lind, a surgeon, per-

formed controlled experiments; James

Cook, a mariner, managed to circle the

globe without his men’s succumbing to

scurvy; and Gilbert Bane, a gentleman,

was able to overcome tradition-bound

prejudices and persuade the Admiralty

to issue daily rations of lemon juice,

which finally eliminated the dreaded

disease.

Scurvy is important reading for today’s

naval officer, not only because it tells a

historically fascinating tale but also be

cause it examines how progress was

made by “thinking out of the box” and

going beyond the assumptions of the

times. As early as the early seventeenth

century open minds discovered a cure

but did not fully understand why it re

lieved the effects of the disease.

“Common sense” at that time made the

approach seem implausible, and the

cure was lost. Scurvy was eventually

defeated, but its cause was not fully

understood until the twentieth century.

The Nobel laureate Albert Szent-

Gyorgyi isolated ascorbic acid in 1932,

and today we are able to buy inexpen

sive megadoses of vitamin C.

The story told by Stephen Brown is fas

cinating in the way it ties together

seemingly disconnected events to show

that cause and effect are not always lin

ear. Vasco de Gama recorded the first

naval outbreak of scurvy during his

1497 voyage around the Cape of Good

Hope. Iroquois Indians helped Jacques

Cartier’s crew survive scurvy while win-

tering on the banks of the St. Lawrence

in 1534. The East India Company de-

feated scurvy in the early 1600s, but, as

we have noted, the cure was lost. Scurvy

developed during the Irish potato famine

of 1847 and appeared among the Forty-

Niners of the California Gold Rush.

Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and

a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical

Mystery of the Age of Sail will fascinate

the history buff, the health-conscious

reader, and anyone who can appreciate

the difficulty we as humans have in ac

cepting empirical evidence when it ap

pears to contradict the conventional

wisdom. At the very least, the reader

will find interesting the story of how

sailors endured the Age of Sail.

XAVIER K. MARUYAMA

Monterey, California

BOOK REVIEWS 159

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