One of the earliest examples of a controlled experiment was sea captain James Lind’s study of scurvy, published in 1747. In Lind’s time scurvy was a terrifying disease, estimated to have killed 2 million sailors between 1500 and 1800. Lind established, as conclusively as anybody could at that time, that a diet of citrus fruit prevented sailors from developing this dread disease. By the early 1800s, scurvy had become a problem of the past for the British navy, as all its ships took to the seas with an adequate supply of citrus fruit. This is usually the point at which history books end the
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