Scurvy on sea and land: political economy and natural history, c. 1780–c. 1850

Abstract

From the late eighteenth century, the ways in which scurvy was understood changed in consequence of the abandonment of humoral pathology and the adoption of a new causal framework informed by nervous physiology. Although there was some narrowing of the etiological framework around dietary deficiency in the wake of the navy's success with the issue of citrus juices, this was rarely to the exclusion of predisposing causes such as fatigue, weather and flagging spirits. Within the navy, the persistence of a multi-factoral framework was relatively unproblematic, for the standard issue of citrus juices and improvements in victualling occurred at the same time as other important reforms in naval health. But outside the navy it was a different matter. In other institutional settings, the continuing belief in the importance of factors other than diet created tensions between medical officers and administrators who found such inclusive views politically inconvenient. After a brief survey of the principal changes in the physiology of scurvy, this article examines how the problem of scurvy was understood, not only in the navy but also in the armies of the East India Company and in British prisons. These were not the only contexts in which scurvy caused concern, but they serve to illustrate the fact that it remained a complex and controversial disease. The article shows how different medical cultures and institutional imperatives took the natural history of scurvy in different directions.