“James Lind, a naval surgeon, conducted an experiment with 12 sailors who had scurvy, given 6 sets of 2 a different diet, consisting of vinegar to one, garlic and mustard to another, oranges and lemons to one, etc. The oranges group got better right away, and the others showed no improvement, yet Lind stuck with her personal belief that the incompletely digested food causing toxins. Between 1500 and 1850 2 million sailors died of scurvy, about half on any long voyage. In 1768-71 Captain Cook circumnavigated the globe and not a single sailor died from Scurvy, because he brought a range of foods to experiment with a solution. the royal society awarded him the Copley Medal. In 1912 Casimir Funk discovered the first vitamin, B12, at the Lister Institute in London. Funk also asserted that the lack of vitamins caused specific problems. This could have been associated with Scurvy, but it wasn't. In 1917 the leading American medical textbook continued to insist that scurvy was caused by "insanitary surroundings, overwork, depression, exposure to cold and damp". And in 1917 America's leading nutritionist, E.V McCollum at the University of Wisconsin, who actually coined the terms Vitamin A and B, declared that scurvy was not actually a dietary deficiency at all but was caused by constipation. ”
