The classical interpretation that diseases and ill health reflected a change in the humoral balance of the body was a powerful element in seventeenth - and eighteenth-century medical thought. Dietary and pharmacological treatments advocated for diseases were frequently devised primarily to counteract or correct the supposed deviant humoral patterns. Edward Strother, in introducing his influential An Essay on Sickness and Health in 1725, was quite categorical on this point: “It is therefore a standing Rule that our Meats and Drinks ought to consist, as nearly as can be, of Particles contrary to the Cause of the Disease reigning....’ (1725: 30).
Correspondingly, eighteenth-century texts on diet and nutrition attached considerable importance to a categorization of foods in terms of their supposed humoral properties so that physicians could select appropriate foods to counteract specific diseases. “The best way of curing the Gout,” wrote W. Stephens (1732: 60) “is to hinder the Generation of this gouty Humour in the Body; this is to be effected no other way, that I know of, but by Diet.”
The same was to hold true in the case of scurvy. For “hot,” “alkaline,” “sea,” scurvy, cooling acidic foods, such as oranges and lemons, were advocated; “cold,” “acid,” “land,” scurvy, in contrast, could be treated by the “hot” antiscorbutic plants such as scurvy grass, brooklime, and the cresses. Thus there developed a tradition, reinforced by empirical observations, that “sea-scurvy” could be treated by oranges and lemons, whereas the methods of choice for scurvy among land dwellers centered on the antiscorbutic herbs. When John Woodall extolled the virtues of lemon juice as a cure for scurvy among sailors he carefully contrasted its value with that of the traditional antiscorbutics “namely Scurvy-grasse, Horse reddish roots, Nasturtia Aquatica. . . and many other good meanes” whose virtues extended, however, “only to the Cure of those which live at home...” (Woodall 1639:61).
Turner, in describing the virtues of brooklime in his Herbal of 1568, penned what must be one of the earliest references to scurvy in an English herbal: “. . . I have proved it my selfe by experience that brooklyme is very good for a decease that reigneth much in Freseland called the Scourbuch. I sod the herbe in butter milke, the cheese and butter taken away, and gave the patientes it so” (128). Clearly, this statement lends further support to the belief that scurvy was either comparatively rare or unrecognized in sixteenth-century Britain.
As it happens, the concentration of foliar ascorbic acid in the three antiscorbutic herbs (Cochlearia officinalis [scurvy grass], Veronica beccabunga [brooklime], and Nasturtium officinale [watercress]) - and particularly in scurvy grass - is low when compared with other angiosperms. Although fresh preparations of the “antiscorbutics” would, in sufficient amounts, certainly have cured scurvy, it seems likely that their entry into, and retention by, sixteenth-century medical literature probably reflected a priori thoughts on the humoral nature of “land scurvy” more than any observed genuine therapeutic value.
James Cook provided his crew with a wide range of vegetables and fruit and scurvy grass collected whenever available, and this, no doubt, protected them from the disease. Had Cook, however, relied on fresh scurvy grass alone, a weekly supply of some 100 pounds of scurvy grass leaf would have been required for a ship with a complement of 100, to provide the Dietary Reference Value of vitamin C (40 mg daily) for the prevention of scurvy.
Nevertheless, the antiscorbutic triumvirate retained a position of importance in the herbals of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, although, as has recently been shown, almost all of the original ascorbic acid would have been lost because of the form in which the preparations were ultimately administered - a finding that must cast considerable doubt on their overall effectiveness (Hughes 1990).
World History
