Aloha and the Art of Conversation - The Monday Morning Memo

“On a three-year voyage in the 1740s, a British naval expedition under the command of commodore George Anson lost fourteen hundred men out of two thousand who sailed. Four were killed by enemy action; virtually all the rest died of scurvy… In roughly the same period, James Lind, a naval surgeon, conducted a scientifically rigorous experiment by finding twelve sailors who had scurvy already, dividing them into pairs, and giving each pair a different putative elixir – vinegar to one, garlic and mustard to another – oranges and lemons to a third, and so on. Five of the groups showed no improvement, but the pair given oranges and lemons made a swift and total recovery. Amazingly, Lind decided to ignore the significance of the result and doggedly stuck with his personal belief that scurvy was caused by incompletely digested food building up toxins within the body.”

- Bill Bryson, At Home, p. 196

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