The Story
NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Stephen R. Bown
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 256
For centuries, scurvy was the great silent killer of the Age of Sail — a grotesque and agonizing disease that rotted the gums, blackened the limbs, and claimed more sailors' lives than storms, shipwrecks, and enemy cannon combined, yet whose cause remained stubbornly, maddeningly elusive. In Scurvy, Stephen Bown tells the gripping and at times darkly comic story of how one of history's most preventable afflictions resisted conquest for so long, following the surgeons, naval commanders, and gentleman scientists who circled the truth for decades before it finally yielded. At the heart of the book is James Lind's landmark 1747 experiment — arguably the first controlled clinical trial in medical history — and the baffling fifty-year delay before the British Navy acted on his findings, a failure of institutional inertia that condemned tens of thousands of men to needless death. Bown writes with pace and wit, turning what might seem a narrow medical history into a sweeping tale about the nature of scientific progress, the politics of knowledge, and the extraordinary human cost of getting the obvious wrong for far too long.
Description
NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Stephen R. Bown
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 256
For centuries, scurvy was the great silent killer of the Age of Sail — a grotesque and agonizing disease that rotted the gums, blackened the limbs, and claimed more sailors' lives than storms, shipwrecks, and enemy cannon combined, yet whose cause remained stubbornly, maddeningly elusive. In Scurvy, Stephen Bown tells the gripping and at times darkly comic story of how one of history's most preventable afflictions resisted conquest for so long, following the surgeons, naval commanders, and gentleman scientists who circled the truth for decades before it finally yielded. At the heart of the book is James Lind's landmark 1747 experiment — arguably the first controlled clinical trial in medical history — and the baffling fifty-year delay before the British Navy acted on his findings, a failure of institutional inertia that condemned tens of thousands of men to needless death. Bown writes with pace and wit, turning what might seem a narrow medical history into a sweeping tale about the nature of scientific progress, the politics of knowledge, and the extraordinary human cost of getting the obvious wrong for far too long.
