James Lind

So Takaki's at-sea experiment was also the start of the concept of fortifying foods that lose some of their nutritional value when processed.

One of the most famous and earliest examples of an experiment that was closer to being an almost randomized control trial was the case of James Lind, the man often credited with discovering the connection between vitamin C deficiency and scurvy way back in 1747.

Lind knew that scurvy, a disease characterized by anemia, swollen and bleeding gums, loose teeth, lethargy, and bleeding under the skin, killed a huge portion of sailors each year.

He took it upon himself to look after a group of 12 men afflicted with the illness, dividing them into groups of two and giving them various remedies from cider to seawater to vinegar.

During long ocean voyages from the 15th to the 18th centuries, scurvy killed more sailors than naval battles, shipwrecks, and storms combined.

In 1747, the British naval surgeon James Lind conducted one of the first controlled clinical trials in medical history aboard the HMS Salisbury.

He divided 12 scurvy patients into pairs and administered different dietary supplements, including vinegar, cider, seawater, and two oranges alongside one lemon daily.

The sailors fed citrus fruit recovered within just a few days and returned to active duty while the other patients showed no improvement.

Yeah, so that is true.

There is a guy, so James Lind, he was this doctor, and he was testing these different things.

Now, historians can argue how helpful he was or whatever.

That's not what I really care about.

What I care about is I was reading some of his writings to write this episode, and he has some amazing treatments.

So these are real treatments that James Lind, in 1747, he's trying to solve scurvy.

And he's a Scottish naval surgeon, and he's testing these remedies.

And you tell me how you think they went.

Just before the daring war leader, Crazy Horse, surrendered to the military, he went down to the agency and roundly rebuked Spotted Tail for signing away the freedom of his people.

From the point of view of the irreconcilables, the diplomatic chief was a trimmer and a traitor, and many of the Sioux have tried to implicate him in the conspiracy against Crazy Horse, which led to his assassination.

But I hold that the facts do not bear out this charge.

The name of Spotted Tail was prominently before the people during the rest of his life.

We will not murder women and children, but we will fight the soldiers when they come." They then left the council and hastened to warn my brother-in-law, Fair Ball, and others who were in danger.

Little Crow declared he would be seen in the front of every battle, and it is true that he was foremost in all the succeeding bloodshed, urging his warriors to spare none.

He ordered his war leader, Many Hail, to fire the first shot, killing the traitor James Lind in the door of his store.

After a year of fighting in which he had met with defeat, the discredited chief retreated to Fort Garry, now Winnipeg, Manitoba, where together with Standing Buffalo, he undertook secret negotiations with his old friends, the Indian traders.

In the 16th century, they are trialing antidotes to poison on condemned criminals, so they are doing something that looks like experimentation.

Probably what we would talk about as scientific method comes in maybe with the birth of the Royal Society and kind of develops from there, and then famously in 1746, you have the first modern kind of clinical trial when James Lind tries various cures for, for people with scurvy.

In terms of what actually helped people, probably quite a lot of the milder medicines.

So you have a lot of remedies for coughs, colds, indigestion, which rely on stuff like sage, rosemary that is antibacterial that you gargle for your sore throat, or rely on things like ginger and mint for upset stomachs.

Mm-hmm.

But then there was this guy named James Lind, and in 1747 he was on the HMS Salisbury and he was like, "Look, we've gotta figure this scurvy thing out." There were all kinds of, like, really bad treatments out there.

Mm.

And the, like, common denominator seemed to be that they were things that were cheap, right? So the, the British Navy-

So, um, there were all of these bad treatments, including things like mercury, which, you know, the, the English were, like, slathering on everything for every reason you could imagine.

Mm-hmm.

But James Lind in 1747 gets these 12 guys on a ship that are starting to get scurvy.

Okay.

They just didn't know.

And a Scottish surgeon, James Lind, in about 1746 or so, looked at a reference in the British East India Company hundreds of years earlier and did a test on sailors.

He had about six or seven, six to 10 sailors, and he put them in three groups.

In one of the groups, he gave them citrus.

... that's where the plot thickens, and it really gets interesting because the skeleton is an organ system, okay?

Mm-hmm.

We have about 12 to 14, depending how you wanna categorize them, and people, including spine surgeons, these are the top trained orthopedic surgeons in the world, they would tell you the primary function of the bone is structural.

It's not.