Posts Tagged ‘scurvy’
“There is no easy walk to freedom”*…
Detail showing the span of Ingram’s walk, from a map of America by Diego Gutiérrez dating from 1562, just 6 years before Ingram claimed to have made his journey
In the autumn of 1569 the Gargaryne, a French trader, was moored off Cape Breton in present day Nova Scotia when its captain M. Champaign was alerted to a commotion outside. Three English men sitting in a native canoe were asking to be let on board. Their names were David Ingram, Richard Brown, and Richard Twyde, and they told him a story that began in Mexico the year before.
In September 1568, they’d been involved in the battle of San Juan de Ulúa (present day Veracruz, Mexico), between a fleet of English privateers, led by John Hawkins and Francis Drake, and Spanish forces under Francisco Luján. After Hawkins’ ship, the Minion, was damaged, he sailed across the Gulf of Mexico where he put the crew on shore. European settlements along the Atlantic coast were sparse and some of the men decided to walk back to San Juan while others including Ingram, Brown, and Twyde intended to follow the coast north in search of English communities. After some died and others returned south, the three remaining sailors, after more than a year wandering up the eastern coast of North America, reached the fishing village at Cape Breton, Canada, unintentionally becoming, if the story is to be believed, the first Europeans to cross North America…
If three shipwrecked English sailors really did travel by foot from Florida to Nova Scotia in 1569 then it would certainly count as one of the most remarkable walks undertaken in recorded history. Although the account’s more fantastical elements, such as the sighting of elephants, have spurred many to consign it to the fiction department, John Toohey argues for a second look: “The Long, Forgotten Walk of David Ingram.”
* Nelson Mandela
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As we take a hike, we might spare a thought for James Lind; he died on this date in 1794. A Scottish physician, he discovered, as a product of the first ever clinical trial, that adding citrus to the diet of English sailors would curb the incidence of scurvy. When made a requirement by Sir Gilbert Blane, this resulted in the prompt eradication of the disease from the British Navy. (The Dutch had implemented this practice almost two centuries earlier, though with less scientific justification.) Lind also recommended shipboard delousing procedures, suggested the use of hospital ships for sick sailors in tropical ports, and arranged for the shipboard distillation of seawater for drinking water– for all of which he is remembered as “The Father of Naval Hygiene.”
“Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed”*…
click here for zoomable version
This map of medicinal plants depicts one or two important species that grew in each state in 1932, identifying the plant as native or cultivated and describing its medical uses. A few species of seaweeds float in the map’s Atlantic Ocean, and the border identifies important medicinal plants from around the world.
The map, printed by the National Wholesale Druggists’ Association for use of pharmacists during a promotional campaign called Pharmacy Week, was intended to boost the image of the profession. At a time when companies were increasingly compounding new pharmaceuticals in labs, pharmacists wanted to emphasize their ability to understand and manipulate the familiar medicinal plants that yielded reliable “vegetable drugs.” “Intense scientific study, expert knowledge, extreme care and accuracy are applied by the pharmacist to medicinal plants and drugs,” the box of text in the map’s lower left-hand corner reads, “from the point of origin through the intricate chemical, botanical, and pharmaceutical processes employed in preparing medicine.”
As historians Arthur Daemmrich and Mary Ellen Bowden write, the early 1930s were a turning point in the pharmaceutical industry. In the previous decades, chemists working for large companies had begun to systematically invent new medicines for the first time, developing synthesized aspirin and vaccines for diseases like tetanus and diphtheria. The 1938 Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act would bring a heightened level of federal regulation to the production of new medicines. And in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, researchers would go on to invent a flood of new antibiotics, psychotropics, antihistamines, and vaccines, increasingly relying on synthetic chemistry to do so. The pharmacist’s direct relationship to the preparation of medicine would diminish accordingly.
More at “A Depression-Era Medicinal Plant Map of the United States“; visit the map’s page on the David Rumsey Map Collection website.
* Genesis 1:29
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As we take our pick, we might recall that it was on this date in 1727 that Dr. James Lind, a Royal Navy surgeon, began an experiment designed to determine a remedy for the scurvy that was afflicting many British sailors. Suspecting that diet was involved, Lind divided a dozen crewmen on the HMS Salisbury who were stricken with scurvy into six groups of two and administered specific dietetic supplements to each group. The two lucky sailors who were fed lemon and oranges for six days recovered, and one was even declared fit for duty before the Salisbury reached port– thus demonstrating (before Vitamin C had been identified) that regular intake of citrus could prevent (or cure) scurvy.
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