Jonathan Lamb — Scurvy_ The Disease of Discovery-Princeton University Press (2016)
—
Casting back through the tangled story of lime and lemon juice, it is pos- sible to see in the enigma of scurvy something like a symmetry between the imperfections of human judgment and the defects of the remedy. Basically there were two methods of preparing rob, either by preserving freshly squeezed juice in casks with 10 percent brandy or rum, or by boiling or reducing it and bottling the concentrate with a seal of oil (Hulme 1768: 57–59; Lloyd and Coulter 1963: 4.113). Lind had correctly rated the ascorbic properties of oranges as superior to lemons. For reasons of portability, he recommended inspissation, using a bain-marie to reduce the liquid to a third of its volume (Lind 1753: 207; Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.299). This was a technique widely in use, but it was tempting to short-circuit the process with some brisk boiling, which was known to make the product less effective, as Blane pointed out. However, Nathaniel Hulme concocted a small amount of rob by Lind’s method for Sir Joseph Banks, who used it on the Endeavour when suffering early signs of scurvy, apparently successfully. Somewhere between the confidence of Hulme and Banks and the blanket rejection of rob by the Sick and Hurt Board in 1781 as “of no service” (Lloyd and Coulter 1961: 3.317), we locate the hesitations of Cook, Blane, and Trotter. These may well have had the same foundation as more decisive estimates of the failure of juice such as that of William Perry, the man who replaced William Monkhouse as Cook’s surgeon on the Endeavour voyage, James Patten’s, surgeon on his sec- ond, or William Anderson’s, surgeon on the third, upon all of whom Sir John

Kenneth J. Carpenter, Linus Pauling, Abram Hoffer — The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C-Cambridge University Press (1986)
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The Dutch obviously knew the value of fruit. In their first voyage of
circumnavigation (1958), scurvy was found to have cleared up in fifteen
days with ’’a sort of sour plums” growing on an island off the coast of
Brazil.*° In the second voyage (1614), they stopped at Sierra Leona “since
our crew was fast beginning to contract scurvy.” In the first few days they
obtained about 3,000 lemons by barter, and on the last “at a guess, some
25,000 lemons, all for a few beads and some poor Nuremberg knives.’ 9° Of
course, even that number would provide 250 men with only one lemon per
day for about three months.
From the beginning, the Dutch tried to be more certain of regular supplies
by establishing vegetable gardens and orchards both at Mauritius and St.
Helena,”° and later at the Cape of Good Hope, where by 1661, they were
reported to have 1,000 citrus fruit trees.°? They even tried the expedient of
laying out small gardens on board ship, but it did not prove practicable
because of waves breaking over the decks in bad weather.
…
In the absence of fresh fruit on board, the sick were given wine, prunes,
and lemon juice. At the end of the century, the standard provision for 100
men for twenty-seven months was one aam (150 liters) of lemon juice.
…
Now we can return to Lind’s own revision of his Treatise that appeared in
1772, and we are immediately confronted in his Introduction (titled ‘“Ad-
vertisement’’) with a mood of deep pessimism.
…
Second, there had been no confirmation of the value of his recommended
procedure for concentrating lemon juice to a “rob.” His friend, Dr. Ives, had
judged it to be actually less potent than ordinary stored lemon juice, which
was in turn less potent than the fresh fruit; though he did confirm Lind’s
finding of the uselessness of sulfuric acid.’®’ The Admiralty’s Sick and Hurt
Board had said in 1767 that they thought that the rob would not be effica-
cious in preventing scurvy and that it would, in any case, be impracticable to
supply the Navy in general because of the quantities required.»©? They had
arranged for a small batch of twenty-two pints of rob to be prepared at
Haslar for testing on a long voyage, but no results were available by 1772.
The revised Treatise still claimed that the concentrated rob contained all the
virtues of the original fruit, but Lind did add a warning that the evaporation
should not be carried out in a glazed vessel.’
10 liters
…
Lind did add a warning that the evaporation
should not be carried out in a glazed vessel.»* The reason was that the
acidity of the juice had been found to dissolve lead from the glaze, thus
making the product poisonou
…
Yet another disappointment for Lind was that, despite that facilities and
the large number of cases available at Haslar, he had been quite unable to
repeat the kind of experiment, with clear-cut results, that he had organized
as a young man at sea on his first attempt.
At different times, I selected a number of patients in Haslar hospital, and adminis-
tered antiscorbutic remedies . . . the juice of scurvy-grass, the Peruvian bark in
large quantities, infusions of berries, stomachic bitters, . . . etc. . . . Patients se-
lected for the trial were confined in wards by themselves; they were strictly watched,
and debarred from eating any green vegetables, fruits, or roots whatever, though
many of them had not tasted any thing of that sort for several months; they were not
even permitted to taste the hospital broth. Their breakfast was balm tea with bread
and butter, for dinner they had light pudding, and for supper, water gruel with
bread and butter. Upon a daily comparison of the state of those patients, I was
surprised to find them all recovering pretty much alike, and though they abstained
altogether from vegetables, yet they in general grew better. This . . . convinced
me, that the disease would often, from various circumstances, take a favourable
turn, which cannot be ascribed to any diet, medicine, or regimen whatever.
…
he died in comparative obscurity.!7* In recent years, a
number of writers, mostly connected with Edinburgh University or with
nautical medicine, have sought actively to raise his status in the history of
medicine both for his work on scurvy and his advice on hygiene (not consid-
ered here) for preventing the spread of infection in the Navy.!”? One eulo-
gist has gone so far as to say that ‘one of the greatest names in the whole
history of medicine is that of James Lind,” and: “The discovery of the cause
and prevention of scurvy is one of the great chapters in all human history;
this discovery was largely the work of James Lind.” 18°
Others have attributed Lind’s relative obscurity to his lack of the social
connections possessed by some other physicians and to their jealousy when
they were passed over for the senior appointment at Haslar.1
…
In fact, Lind never claimed that “rob” prepared by his
recipe had cured scurvy, and we have seen that he included in his third
edition Dr. Ives’s evaluation of it as “inferior to stored fruit juice.”
…
It was Nathaniel Hulme, rather than
Lind, who published A Proposal for Preventing the Scurvy in the British Navy
in 1768, and argued that to supply every ship with enough citrus juice to
provide 11/2 ounces per man per day, together with two ounces of sugar, was
both practicable and economical.
…
In 1757, John Travis, a surgeon practicing at the English seaport of Scar-
borough, presented the hypothesis that the scurvy so prevalent in the British
Navy was caused by copper poisoning.’!? He argued that men on merchant
ships, which generally had iron boilers for cooking their food, where much
less affected that those on naval ships, which always had copper boilers,
even though the provisions on the latter were usually of higher quality.
…
Dried potato
strips were boiled in large volumes of water, left to stand in the water for
ninety minutes, then mashed, and kept hot for thirty minutes before being
served. It was calculated that the daily intake of vitamin C was less than
1.0 mg and probably less than 0.5 mg. The levels of other vitamins and of
iron were all satisfactory.’
…
Dried potatoes would have lost much of their
vitamin content, but not necessarily all

в недалеком прошлом полярные исследователи опасались использовать для питья воду, образовавшуюся при таянии льда и снега. Среди них господствовало предубеждение, что талая вода вредна для организма. В ней усматривали одну из главных причин возникновения цинги. Именно поэтому Джордж Де-Лонг — начальник американской экспедиции к Северному полюсу на судне «Жан-нетта» (1879 — 1881 гг.) — категорически запретил пользоваться для питья талой водой из снежниц и требовал перегонять ее в специальном кубе, несмотря на необходимость экономить топливо.

В 1760 году Джеймс Линд, наблюдавший 5743 больных в течение 2 лет в военно-морском госпитале Хаслар, составил процентовку по заболеваниям моряков.
Итак
Лихорадка (все типы) — 47,9%
Цинга — 29,9%
Чахотка (consumptions) — 6,3%
Ревматизм — 6,1%
Болезни/растяжения связок (fluxes) — 4,3%
Венерические заболевания — 1,8%
Боли или старые раны — 1,4%
Кожные болезни — 1,3%
Малярия и перемежающаяся лихорадка — 1,2%
Оспа — 0,9%
Остальное — 5%.

М. И. Лилье. Ноябрь. Дневник осады Порт-Артура
Один из докторов говорил мне, что общее число больных и раненых в госпиталях доходит уже до 8200 человек. Положение их ужасное. Часть раненых уже заражены цингой, и теперь их кожа и мясо до того дряблы, что напоминают какой-то кисель.
…
Госпиталя переполнены; у докторов прямо руки опускаются при виде своего бессилия. А между тем цинга все растет; у многих раненых от цинги раскрылись старые, уже зажившие раны.
…
Цинга в городе все растет и начинает принимать угрожающие размеры.

http://www.idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
Atkinson inclined to Almroth Wright’s theory that scurvy is due to an acid intoxication of the blood caused by bacteria…
There was little scurvy in Nelson’s days; but the reason is not clear, since, according to modern research, lime-juice only helps to prevent it. We had, at Cape Evans, a salt of sodium to be used to alkalize the blood as an experiment, if necessity arose. Darkness, cold, and hard work are in Atkinson’s opinion important causes of scurvy.
…
Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.
But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it.

It’s been asserted that the French and Spanish had a lower rate of scurvy than the English because they ate onions (13% RDA/100g) and garlic (1%) (Goethe 7). Unfortunately, I have not been able to confirm that they were included in the standard seventeenth-century rations.
In the winter of 1535-36, the French explorer Cartier wintered by the Iroquois village near what is now Montreal, and his men developed scurvy. The Indians successfully treated them with an extract made from a tree called annedda, and now believed to have been the spruce or hemlock. This did not lead, however, to general adoption of the evergreen extract as an antiscorbutic, even in French Canada. There was, for example, a scurvy outbreak at Three Rivers in 1634-5. Moreover, it was not a sure thing; in 1743-4 at Churchill, eleven men died of scurvy despite having drunk spruce beer (Erichsen-Brown 10-1).
Netherlands. In 1598 the Dutch East Indies fleet took lemon juice and grew horseradish and scurvy grass (Cochlearia spp., spoonwort) on board, suffering the loss of only 15 men (whereas the 1595 fleet lost 88) (McDowell). Horseradish is 6% RDA/100g.
James Woodall (d. 1643), in The Surgeon’s Mate (1617), promoted the use of lemons, limes, tamarinds and oranges (Reiss 130). So, too, did John Smith in An Accidence (1626) (Baron n39).
Unfortunately, the Mayflower lost 50 out of 102 on board, mostly to scurvy, during its 56-day 1620 voyage (Baron) and by the 1630s, the East India Company had settled on tamarinds (which lack vitamin C) and oil of vitriol (sulfuric acid) as the answer to scurvy.
..
An 1864 Times expose revealed that some “lemon” juice was manufactured in England from tartaric and other acids, and essence of lemon added to give it a lemony flavor. Such juice would have been completely ineffectual. Nonetheless, after scurvy forced abandonment of the Nares Arctic expedition in 1877, the navy decided that “lemon” juice didn’t prevent scurvy after all (Baron).

/Théophile-Jules Pelouze (1807-1867) discovered in juice of the berries of the rowan tree (Sorbius aucuparia), which had been left standing for more than a year, a sweet component, which he named sorbine (today sorbose). Sorbine crystallized in brilliant prisms, had the global composition of glucose, C6H12O6, and resisted the alcoholic fermentation. 45 Many researchers had tried unsuccessfully to reproduce Pelouze’s results. According to Bertrand this was because sorbose was not present in the fresh juice of the berries.46,47 When left alone, the juice went through the usual alcoholic fermentation; after a few days the glucose had disappeared completely and an equivalent amount of alcohol had formed. Afterwards, the surface of the liquid became covered first with a layer of Saccharomyces vini (which transformed the alcohol into water and CO2), and then by layers of several moulds (mainly Penicilium glaucum). None of these gave place to the formation of sorbose. Later, the surface of the liquid became gelatinous and
consistent, larvae and insects appeared on it together with a particular odor, which strongly attracted a large number of small flies of Drosophila funebris. It was found that these flies carried a microorganism, which converted the oxidized the sorbitol (C6H14O6) present in the medium into sorbose. The resulting liquid reduced strongly the Fehling reagent. According to Bertrand, the
sorbose bacteria was easily obtained by letting a solution of vinegar, wine, and water, stand alone during several days, at a temperature of 20 ° to 30 °C. Added to an aqueous solution of sorbitol, it converted the latter to sorbose, with 80 % yield.47 //

Сорбоза была открыта в 1852 г. Теофилем Пелузом — одним из первооткрывателей пироксилина, учителем Собреро (который открыл нитроглицерин) и Альфреда Нобеля (который стажировался в лаборатории Пелуза в течение года).

Однако и эту, в общем-то не сложную последовательность можно еще сильнее упростить, применив прямое окисление сорбозы азотной кислотой, как, например, описывается в патенте US2467442.
//100 grams of Sorbose are dissolved in a mixture of 150 ccs. of nitric acid (sp. gr. 1.4) and 150 ccs. of water. 5 C. 13 grams of sodium nitrite are added and the reaction mixture is maintained for 15 day at 5 °C. Then the solution is neutralised with calcium carbonate and, after filtration, the solution is diluted with such a quantity of methyl alcohol that the calcium salt of ketogulonic acid is precipitated. The ketogulonic acid is now converted into ascorbic acid in known manner by boiling with hydrochloric acid. In the resulting solution the ascorbic acid is determined by titration, whereby it is found that 33.4 grams of ketogulonic acid are present. The oxidation of the sorbose has thus proceeded for 31 mol per cent in the desired direction.//
Таким образом, нескольких килограммов рябины, стакана азотной кислоты и стакана кислоты соляной будет достаточно для получения одной-двух тысяч доз аскорбиновой кислоты.

>>Медные мерные ложки в каждом втором магазине.>>
и что из этого следует? Они для кофе/муки/других сыпучих продуктов. Отмеривать жидкости, да еще кислые, стал бы только идиот — это всем было ясно и 150 лет назад, и пару тысяч, безотносительно к витаминам.
Вообще, это утверждение, что всему виной была замена лимонов на лайм и какие то медные трубы, явно слишком сильное упрощение (опять же, сугубо имхо). Основная причина — переход к промышленной заготовке сока в больших объемах и его долгом хранении.

Медные мерные ложки в каждом втором магазине. https://www.joom.com/ru/products/602f286833599c01072ade46

> для разлива лимонного сока