Status Updates From Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Ma...

DNF.

I happened across this gem by accident. As I was about to start my non-fiction book in my reading rotation, I bumped Medieval Pirates in preference to death and disease on the high seas.

I am officially addicted to a book about scurvy. I honestly can't wait to sit and read this all day!

I knew I would love this book.

Horrifying and fascinating

I'm callin' it. No more. I KNOW THAT ASCORBIC ACID IS THE ANSWER IT'S THE 21ST GODDAMNED CENTURY so tell me how people who *couldn't* have known it was ascorbic acid firgured it out without saying it's ascorbic acid EVERY MOTHERFUCKIN PAGE

1 The 18th Century Seafaring World: The Age of Scurvy is pretty repetitious and I can but hope he'll get over that or I'll get brain-scurvy. Unappealing facts, appalling images, the rotten-souled class and religion systems all present and accounted for.

This reads like a school text book. I’m finishing it out of sheer determination and spite.

Interesting, I never knew how scurvy worked...but it's looking like one of those books which could have been a long-ish magazine article.

"The war in America was an organizational nightmare for the British...the determination of the colonists to shake off Britain's yoke made it nearly impossible to subdue them indefinitely." There we go. We can't blame it ALL on one guy. Rest easy, Sir Pringle. You're just responsible for thousands of deaths, not thousands of deaths AND the loss of the colonies.

"It can be argued that...the Thirteen Colonies and their allies in the War of American Independence owe their success against Britain to the overweening, stubborn pride, or willful blindness, of Sir John Pringle who influenced the Admirality in favour of an antiscorbutic regimen that had little effect in reducing scurvy..." 'MURICA!

This was a really enjoyable historical/medical study of scurvy & its role in social & political development. I'm always amazed at how the human race managed to survive!

Great book, but so full of typos it's comical.

So far I am not impressed. The writing is very redundant so far I have read the description of symptoms of scurvy, the cure for scurvy, and the population that suffered from scurvy about 10 times. Feels like a term paper expanded into a book with a lot of fill words.