Putrid gums and 'Dead Men's Cloaths'

Abstract

I enjoyed Dr Sutton's paper (December 2003 JRSM1): it is good that Lind and Salisbury are not forgotten, even though (or perhaps especially because) his work was neglected in his time. It is unlikely, for instance, that James Cook had ever heard of it. Dr Sutton is quite right in emphasizing the disparity between ships' captains' views on sickness at sea and those of (especially present-day) medical opinion. Ships' captains set their threshold for sickness at the level where a man could no longer stand his watch, not at the level where his health was first impaired. He also speculates on the reasons for the neglect of Lind. I think it can be put down to the fact that Lind had some science but little influence. David McBride (1726-1778), on the other hand, had influence but no science: he was brother to a naval captain who was friendly with Sandwich the First Lord and with Hugh Palliser (Cook's patron). He formed the idea that the fermentation of malt released ‘fixed air’ (CO2) which was essential to the absorption of nutrients from the gut. He published his views with some detail lifted from Lind and with oblique homage to Sir John Pringle, and succeeded in having quantities of malt imposed on Cook with instructions to make a trial of it. Indeed Cook was supposed to make trials of malt, of portable soup, of ‘sour krout’ and of a rob of oranges and lemons, which latter had been boiled down enough to destroy all its vitamin C. The further problem was that his surgeon in Endeavour, William Brougham Monkhouse, though briefed at the Admiralty on the use and assessment of these materials, neglected his medical duties to enjoy the excitement of ecotourism—and after Monkhouse's death young William Perry inherited a muddle such that his report amounted to little more than deference to Pringle, McBride and malt. Meanwhile Cook himself had achieved enough by his own empirical measures—cleanliness such as the British seaman was quite unaccustomed to; fumigation below decks; wherever possible setting three watches, which happened to reduce stress and the additional vitamin C demands it creates; and the gathering of fresh greens at every shore call—to reduce the impact of scurvy quite dramatically. His measures achieved two things. In the first place, they prompted the Royal Society to award him its Copley medal in 1776 for his work in combating scurvy at sea; and in the second, the very success he achieved, without an effective vitamin C preparation apart from his greens, arguably served to delay the routine use by the Royal Navy of citrus preparations such as the East India Company had employed for over a century. In fact it was not until (Sir) Gilbert Blane, who combined science and influence, that the Navy ‘caught up’ in 1795.