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Things to watch out for.
Jun. 12th, 2009 09:12 amHaving segued pretty directly from reading Patrick O'Brian (Post Captain, HMS Surprise) to reading Diana Gabaldon (Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, and now Voyager in the span of ... a week or so?) I just spent about twenty minutes sitting at my desk reading Jeremy Hugh Baron's article "Sailors' Scurvy Before and After James Lind: A Reassessment" (Nutrition Reviews, v.67 n.6, pp.315-332, June 2009) and wishing that he'd talked more about lime juice.
(The upshot seems to be, for those desperately interested in scurvy and lime juice, that lemon juice was the vastly preferred preventative recommended by people who actually dealt with actual scurvy cases, while lime juice was subsequently recommended by people ... engaged in growing limes, and was far less effective than correctly-preserved lemon juice. Lime juice came into use much later and was never as widespread, globally speaking, hence getting attached as a nationalist tag to British ships/sailors/etc.)
(The upshot seems to be, for those desperately interested in scurvy and lime juice, that lemon juice was the vastly preferred preventative recommended by people who actually dealt with actual scurvy cases, while lime juice was subsequently recommended by people ... engaged in growing limes, and was far less effective than correctly-preserved lemon juice. Lime juice came into use much later and was never as widespread, globally speaking, hence getting attached as a nationalist tag to British ships/sailors/etc.)