At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Over time, people noticed that sailors with scurvy tended to recover when they got to a port and received fresh foods, but nobody could agree what it was about those foods that helped them. Some thought it wasn’t the foods at all, but just a change of air. In any case, it wasn’t possible to keep foods fresh on long voyages, so simply identifying efficacious vegetables and the like was slightly pointless. What was needed was some kind of distilled essence—an antiscorbutic, as the medical men termed it—that would be effective against scurvy but portable, too. In the 1760s, a Scottish doctor named William Stark, evidently encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, conducted a series of patently foolhardy experiments in which he tried to identify the active agent by, somewhat bizarrely, depriving himself of it. For weeks he lived on only the most basic of foods—bread and water chiefly—to see what would happen. What happened was that in just over six months he killed himself, from scurvy, without coming to any helpful conclusions at all.