Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery by Jonathan Lamb (review)

And all would cry beware! Beware!His rotting gums and thinning hair!Ward him from the noxious airKeep from him your maggot breadMind the dreams that fill his headFind citrus rob to be his fare.

Scurvy was among the most complex and destructive afflictions of the premodern age, so "various and manifold" in its symptoms that one medical author described it as "the Iliad of Diseases," and so deadly that it has been estimated that two million sailors lost their lives to it between 1500 and 1800. The threat of it haunted every long maritime journey. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose Kubla Khan I have mangled above, explored the effects of the disease in the story told from the perspective of an "Ancient Mariner," whose becalmed ship faced a scorbutic plague.

Lamb's elegant and fascinating study of scurvy eschews a triumphalist history of the eventual discovery of a cure in favor of a thoughtful exploration—via a variety of literary, medical, scientific, and military sources—of how scurvy was experienced and what it came to mean. Particularly fine are the descriptions of "scorbutic nostalgia," the emotional state following the dreams and reveries of those who see in their imaginations precisely that food and drink that their body seems to need. Of the three kinds of excavations offered here—historicist, literary, and scientific—the first two seem the most successful, for Lamb achieves the nearly impossible in recovering and explicating descriptions of a disease whose effects were protean, embodied, and deemed almost definitionally inexpressible. Whether the argument actually requires retrospective diagnoses or contemporary scientific accounts of the effect of the disease on the nervous system may be a matter of personal preference.