Because of my newfound interest in Vitamin C, I've been doing some reading on the subject. One very interesting book is available online for free. It's Irwin Stone's 1972 book The Healing Factor:Vitamin C Against Disease, and it can be read here.
(Please note that some of the "next page" links within the document don't work, but the Table of Contents provides working links to all chapters.)
One particularly interesting detail is the reluctance of the British Navy to enforce a diet that would save their sailors from scurvy. Stone recounts:
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the stage had been prepared for advances in the prevention and treatment of scurvy. Admiral Sir Richard Hawkins, in 1593, protected the crew of the Dainty with oranges and lemons; among others, Commodore Lancaster, in voyages for the East India Company, had shown by 1600 that scurvy was an easily preventable disease. It remained, however, for James Lind to prove this. James Lind, surgeon's mate on H.M.S. Salisbury, was … a keen observer and eventually became known as "the father of nautical medicine." He conducted the first properly controlled clinical therapeutic trial on record.
The crucial experiment Lind performed in 1747 at sea on the Salisbury, was to take twelve seamen suffering from the same degree of scurvy and divide them into six groups of two each. In addition to their regular diet, he gave each group a different, commonly used treatment for scurvy and observed its action. One group received a quart of cider daily, the second group received twenty-five drops of dilute sulfuric acid three times a day, the third group was given two spoonfuls of vinegar three times a day, the fourth team drank half a pint of seawater three times a day, the fifth received a concoction of garlic, mustard seed, horseradish, gum myrrh, and balsam of Peru. The last group received two oranges and one lemon daily for six days. These last two men improved with such astonishing rapidity that they were used as nurses to care for the others. There was slight improvement in the cider group but no benefit was observed in the others. Here was clear-cut, easily understandable evidence of the value of citrus fruit in the cure of scurvy….
What was clear to Lind, and is commonplace to us, was not so readily accepted by the naval bureaucracy of his day. It took over forty years for the British Admiralty to adopt Lind's simple prophylactic daily dose of one ounce of lemon juice per man. The official order cam through in 1795, just a year after Lind's death. It has been estimated that this 42-year delay cost the Royal Navy 100,000 casualties to scurvy.
This simple regimen wiped out scurvy in the naval forces of England, and it became their secret weapon for maintaining their mastery of the seas. There is no doubt that this simple ration of lemon juice was of far greater importance to the Royal Navy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than all the improvements in speed, firepower, armor, and seaworthiness. Naval officers of the time asserted that it was equivalent to doubling the fighting force of the navy….
One would imagine that Lind's clear-cut clinical demonstration and the experiences of the Royal Navy in wiping out the disease would have pointed the way toward banishing this disease completely. However, it takes much more than logic and clear-cut demonstrations to overcome the inertia and dogma of established thought. The forty-two years that it took the British Admiralty to adopt Lind's recommendations may seem unduly long, even for a stolid bureaucracy, but this may be a speed record compared with other agencies. The British Board of Trade took 112 years — until 1865 — before similar precautions were adopted for the British merchant marine. There are records of seamen on the merchant vessels succumbing to scurvy even while delivering lemons to the ships of the Royal Navy. Over 30,000 cases of scurvy were reported in the American Civil War and it took the U.S. Army until 1895 to adopt antiscorbutic rations.
[Chapters 5 and 6, bold emphasis added.]
Somehow this story put me in mind of some Gilbert & Sullivan lyrics:
Now, landsmen all, whoever you may be
If you want to rise to the top of the tree
If your soul isn't fettered to an office stool
Be careful to be guided by this golden rule
Stick close to your desks and never go to sea
And you all may be Rulers of the Queen's Navy