In his book, 1 Stephen Bown credited a solution to the mystery of scurvy to three people: the naval surgeon James Lind (1716-1794), sea captain James Cook (1728-1779), and a physician, Gilbert Blane (1749-1843). Infantile scurvy was clearly described (conjoined with rickets) by Francis Glisson in his De Rachitide in 1650. The English words scurvy, scurvy weed, scurvy grass, scuruie or scorbute, and scorbutic appear in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but are recorded earlier by the Portuguese and others. The illness scurvy was observed but unnamed in the ancient writings of Hippocrates and Pliny. In more recent times Koch’s discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in phthisis or consumption in 1882, and Marshall and Warren’s Helicobacter pylori in peptic ulcer in 1982 are analogous. Scurvy is an example of a disease well recognized but whose cause eluded doctors for centuries until an empirical curative remedy and later a specific cause were discovered. Cures of disease are still relatively uncommon.
