Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery

Lamb (The Things Things Say), professor of the humanities at Vanderbilt University, surveys the ravages of a nutritional disease that for centuries stalked the ships that sailed in search of new lands and treasure. Scurvy imbued the literature of the time even as its diagnosis and treatment remained maddeningly elusive. Physician James Lind’s controlled trial in 1747 found that citrus fruits cured scurvy, but over time that treatment fell out of favor in the face of competing ideas about the disease’s provenance. Expertly researched and richly written, Lamb’s study tracks the links in sufferers’ unusual symptoms—heightened senses, cravings, and emotions that became known as “scorbutic nostalgia,” as well as a ghastly physical breakdown—through naval logs, physicians’ journals, and literature. The disease’s first appearance in print occurred in 1572 in a poem celebrating Vasco da Gama’s expedition into the Indian Ocean. It also popped up in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Herman Melville’s Omoo, and the poetry of Coleridge. The history of the devastating deficiency, Lamb argues, is one of “periodic fits of willful ignorance that blinded the world to a necessary truth and an obvious cure: a dismal record then of lost opportunities and culpable amnesias.” Lamb’s rigorously scholastic and elegantly lyrical account should intrigue both historians and literary critics. (Dec.)