There are any number of things that can go wrong in research. He tried sending ships out with bottled juice to save storage space, and that didn’t work – the bottling process heated the juice and destroyed the vitamin C. It worked, but he still didn’t understand HOW it worked. The winning combination was two oranges and a lemon. He divided 12 sick sailors into 6 groups, kept them all on the same diet, and gave each group a different test remedy: a quart of cider, 25 drops of elixir of vitriol (sulfuric acid – I hope he diluted it in water before he gave it to them!), 6 spoons of vinegar, half a pint of seawater, two oranges and a lemon, or a spicy past plus a drink of barley. Lind had heard reports of successful treatment, and he had developed the hypothesis that scurvy was due to putrefaction and could be prevented by acids. But vitamins weren’t discovered for another 2 centuries. Today we know this was due to a deficiency of vitamin C. Many of them developed scurvy, where they became weak, unable to work, and had internal bleeding, bleeding gums, and other symptoms. Back then, the sailing ships went out for years at a time and sailors had no access to fresh foods. The first modern clinical trial was done by James Lind of the Royal Navy in 1747.
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