Until 1910 CE, all humans knew about vitamins was that certain foods gave you different perks: around 1500 BCE Egyptians knew that eating liver helped you see in the dark without knowing what vitamin A was, and as early as 1400 CE Europeans with no knowledge of vitamin C picked up on how fresh food and citrus kept you from getting scurvy. But sadly, in what can fairly be described as “a comedy of errors, only not funny,” Europeans—who generally like to think of themselves as being a pretty savvy lot—managed to forget and then rediscover this fact about vitamin C at least seven more times over
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