Eight Decades of Scurvy. The Case History of a Misleading Dietary Hypothesis.

This paper will discuss the history of scurvy in this country over the past eight decades and try to explain how a potentially-fatal and insidious genetic disease of such wide incidence in our population could become an unrecognized, phantom disease, to which most present day doctors pay little or no attention and are unconcerned. It will also discuss the widely accepted dietary theory which has been applied by nutritionists attempting to solve this problem in medical genetics. The author believes that the wide acceptance of this misleading dietary hypothesis is the source of the medical complacency and apathy and the dangerous continuing high incidence of Chronic Subclinical Scurvy.

Scurvy is a disease which during the course of human prehistory and recorded history has killed more victims, caused more disease and suffering and has shortened the human life span more than any other single factor. (Stone, 1972). This disease has been epidemic among humans ever since they appeared on this earth. If it weren’t for the high mortality of scurvy and its efficient control of population growth, our problems of overpopulation would have overwhelmed us centuries ago.

Many people believe that scurvy is not a modern disease because they think the problem was solved in the 18th Century when Dr. James Lind of Britain’s Royal Navy (Lind, 1753) found that one ounce of fresh lemon juice would prevent the appearance of the terminal symptoms of this dread disease in his scorbutic sailors.

Others, including nutritionists, home economists and a large proportion of the medical profession believe that the minute daily doses of “Vitamin C” proposed in 1912 in the “Vitamin C-Dietary Deficiency Disease Hypothesis” (Funk, 1912) has completely solved the problem of scurvy and there is nothing further to worry about. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let us take a look at the sequence of historical events in scurvy of the past 80 years and try to see what went wrong and what finally went right…

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“Eight Decades of Scurvy. The Case History of a Misleading Dietary Hypothesis”