Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Scurvy

Episode Date: December 18, 2015

This week on Sawbones, we put the lime in the coconut and the severity of our scurvy is not diminished in the slightest. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saabones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books! One, two, one, two, three, four! I'm Sydney McLeod. Sydney, I'm Sydney McLeod.

I'm Sydney McLeod. I'm Sydney McLeod. I'm Sydney McLeod. I'm Sydney McLeod. I'm Sydney McLeod. I'm Sydney McLeod up to have misguided medicine. I'm your co-host just macroman I'm Sydney macroman Sydney. I got a therapeutic orange pinnacle to chill upstairs. I'm fine there There a putic Orange pinnacle why were you so distracted by me cracking open or refreshing cheer wine?

It was a very loud like I felt like it was you intentionally held your can of cheer wine very close to the microphone as you opened it like it felt It felt intentional. You don't have headphones on. How would you have any way of like of that impacting? Yeah, I mean it was I'm just sitting here like in real life like not headphone sound but like all Like actual sound and it was very loud But there's people at home are like wow, it sounds really refreshing. All right wait Are you like a shell for? Fear wine for Chris refreshing cheer one made the The same recipes since

I'm gonna have to stop you right there. We don't we don't get paid to do any ads for them. So moving on I made a therapeutic nothing for free guys nothing works up the show the show is free therapeutic orange bannacold Well, um medicinal prescription orange bannacold that sounds first of all that sounds delicious Mm-hmm and Especially because I requested yeah, not bland just a little like textually I'm thinking somebody you sure wait have you ever had it before? Roots salad maybe on top or perhaps with chocolate shabings? I like the chocolate shape, chocolate and orange.

Chocolate orange, exactly. Yeah, that's a good classic combination. But it's a therapeutic game. Okay, no, and it sounds amazing and I asked you to make that, so I'm really glad that you did. But why are we calling it therapeutic? Well, it treats the only disease that I think everybody is qualified to treat, and that is scurvy.

As we all know, soldiers abroad in the ocean felt- Soldiers abroad in the ocean? Should I just tell the Christmas story, please? The Christmas story of scurvy? Soldiers abroad in the ocean started walking and the friends said, you look shorter like you're scrunched over and you're scrunching around the ship. You got here something about that. And one of the Italian sailors on the boat

was like, hey, it's a me, Luigi. I made the orange pen look up for you and they ate it. They all shared it on Christmas day. And they all started, like while they were eating it, they're like, oh, I feel a little better. They're like sitting up a bit straighter.

Instead of like when they opened their crackers and they all put their crowns on, they were like, really did feel like kings the first time quite a few months. And what they discovered was that it was the orange panacolta, specifically the orange panacolta part of it. And they made them feel better and cured their scurvy. And that is why every year we get scurvy. And then on Christmas day, we eat Orange Fandicole to,

and it cures us some of our scurvy. And that is the Macroi Family tradition. Christmas. That's the Christmas story as in the Bible. Looking up. Okay, so it's not. I'm pretty sure that's wrong. I'm definitely sure your information about scurvy. I mean, I know you're on to something here with the oranges, but do you know anything about scurvy? I mean, I just literally laid out everything I know for you about scurvy.

So you think it makes people scrunch up? Kind of scrunchy. Kind of scrunchy. Yeah, okay Uh, why don't you play everquest? I would walk around crouched until people ahead scurvy and they believed you Well, I mean you can't get scurvy. It's a video games. We hard so I doubt they did I Don't know I thought maybe in your video game world you like you could get scurvy like you could get vitamin deficiencies I'm sure they're games where you can get scurvy prep it's a Sidmire's Pirates, something like that. I'm certain there have to be, right? Yeah.

Crusader Kings is probably... What, why don't we talk about scurvy? Yeah, I love it. Since you appeared to know very little. I want to thank a lot of people are dying to know about scurvy. I think it's because pirates, everybody loves pirates. People are dying of scurvy every day. No, well, not many.

Not often, not as many But thank you Rebecca Josh Stephanie Abigail Chad Kate Brittany Allison Nicole Alicia Jennifer and Alice A lot of people a lot of people scurvy fever a lot of pirates out there want to know what to do Scurvy fever seems redundant. Let's just say scurvy a lot of I don't pay I don't know that they have scurvy. That what all the emails were what are your sobans save me I have scurvy I'm scurvy as you probably already know and is just and kind of already alluded to scurvy is a deficiency of vitamin C it's the easiest I think of the diseases to explain maybe that we've tackled and the fun is to

say you do yes you don't have enough vitamin C, you need more. We really didn't know about vitamin C until the 1930s. It wasn't described until then, like 1933. But we kind of figured out that there was something wrong with people and that vitamins, well, things that contained certain, something, foods had something in common could fix it a lot sooner. Before we knew terms like vitamin deficiency and scurvy certain something, food has something in common could fix it a lot sooner.

Before we knew terms like vitamin deficiency and scurvy and vitamin C and all that kind of thing, we sort of understood scurvy. Now let me tell you a little bit about scurvy first before we get into the history of it. Because luckily nowadays most of us aren't going to get scurvy. That's good to hear. Imagine my relief. Vitamin C is easily obtained through our diet or through lots of people like to supplement with it.

I know Justin, you're a fan when you have a cold. Mm-hmm. So it's not hard to maintain your vitamin C stores. But let's say you go about 16 and 90 days without vitamin C. Okay. You're going to start showing the first stage signs of scurvy. The first stage of scurvy is like just fatigue and some muscle aches. Like you're really tired and this was a big problem as you can imagine because we're gonna

talk a lot about ships and sailors and those are the people who you know we associate with scurvy. If they were just exhausted and couldn't do their work on the ship. The second stage progresses to the classic you've probably heard of bleeding gums. So your gums start to bleed, you start to get some joint pains, you may start to lose some teeth. Then we progress to the third stage, which is much worse. The pain, the joint pain and the muscle pain

and everything becomes much, much worse. Your gums instead of just bleeding, they bleed a lot more, but they also start to like, putrify and rot. Because there's a lot of talk, when you read about like historical descriptions of scurvy about people's breath, their breath is just like death because their gums are rotting. You can start to get himrages all over your skin, you can start to get ulcers all over your skin and gangrene and things start kind of dying and breaking down. And then in the final stage of scurvy, you start to get feverish, probably,

because you're getting extra, you know, you're getting infections and stuff too. You're getting acrosis, death of different tissue areas. You get hemorrhaging, and the hemorrhaging can finally occur in like your heart or your brain somewhere really important, and then unfortunately you can die. So that's kind of what happens with scurvy. So if you can imagine this happening to a lot of people at once, this was probably pretty

terrifying. Right. On a ship especially because you're roughly on the same time, presumably, since last of item to say, so I bet you would see people kind of get it in waves. Exactly. Exactly. And you had no idea how people were getting it or how to stop it. The reason that it's kind of funny because if you look back as to why when you start to

see descriptions of scurvy, when it happened, you could theorize that initially humans lived where stuff grew all year long. We lived in warmer areas because otherwise if we lived cold places before we knew how to grow things, then we'd die when it was really cold. So as we start to see farming in agrarian societies and humans start migrating to more temperate regions, and we start depending more on grain and things like that, we start to see vitamin deficiencies like scurvy

because then we're not naturally around all the vitamins we need necessarily. It makes sense. You can't get citrus fruit all year long and such. The Egyptians spoke of something that sounded like scurvy in the Ebers Papyrus. They actually advised, and they described something with bleeding and hemorrhaging and all this stuff, and then they said, you know, you should probably eat some onions for it. So, are there many tea and onions?

Yes, there is. Nailed it. What's up all time before? I know, that's pretty good. Probably the one. I don't know how, probably just do process of elimination like try different things Onion seemed to work or just like onions are good on things like they just light it like onions I onions are where it's weird to think that onions have any sort of nutritional value. They just seem like like Salt like kind of like salty water like hard salty water Salt, like kind of like salty water, like hard salty water. That's your, that's what you think an onion is, is like,

it's like hard salty water. I feel like you've been eating the wrong onions. Or maybe, do you know what an onion is? Yeah, celery is like crunchy water. I know this. Okay. This is known. And onions like hard salty water that makes you cry. So on your burger, do you ask for hard salty water?

No, I say to millions. I'm still living in society, Sydney. Sheesh. Hypocrity is also described something that was probably scurvy. He talked about specifically, whenever you see a description of the bleeding gums and the really bad breath and just like bleeding from the nose and bleeding from the skin and that kind of stuff, it's probably scurvy. I mean, there's lots of other. It's probably scurvy.

I mean, there's lots of other things, but probably scurvy that they were talking about. But he was much less helpful when he talked about what to do. He just said that, look, there is a treatment for it, but quote, it's a tedious cure that often accompanied a patient to his death. Yeah. I don't know what the cure was,

but it sounds like it wasn't a good one. That's why he was, he's not even gonna dain't detail it there. It's like trusting it. Yeah, I do know what the cure was, but it sounds like it wasn't a good one. That's why he wasn't, he's not even going to dainty detail up there. It's like trusting it. Yeah, I do know what it's like, go water some time, lay it out here. And you're going to die anyway. Yeah, so just like forget it. The name scurvy actually probably comes from either the Danish word or the Dutch word

for mouth ulcers, which sounds like scurvy because there were a lot of ulcerations in the mouth. So we have the word long before we have the idea of vitamin C or anything like that. Is it weird that we have like, is it weird that we have a name for this? Like, is that is that odd that we have? Because it's not really a disease, right? It's not even really an illness technically, right? It's a vitamin deficiency.

But it's a vitamin deficiency. It's not like it's vitamin C deficiency. It's not a scur. It's, well, I'm not sure. Give me a name to know and apply that it has a pathology for lack of a better term. I mean, it does, you need vitamin C for a lot of things. I'm using the wrong word then. Like, why do we have a name for this?

Like, because it's just vitamin C deficiency. You're deficient about vitamin C. Well, I think, so, first of all, I will say this. We have named for most of the vitamin deficiencies. McGuah. Velagra, Barry Berry. Drop C. Well, that's a whole other thing.

That's many things. Crop C. There are names for different rickets. Okay. There are names for a lot of different vitamin deficiencies. And if I had to guess why, first of all, doctors love to name things. Sure.

The only surprising thing is that they're not all named after doctors, right? Because that's typically what we like to do. Yeah, I'm surprised actually, the vitamins are named after doctors. It's a good point. But with the vitamin deficiencies, my guess would be it's because we understood

that there was a clinical syndrome that these people had, but long before we understood what was causing it. Okay, well, that makes sense. Because we had to understand was a clinical syndrome that these people had, but long before we understood what was causing it. Okay, well, it makes sense. Because we had to understand what a vitamin was and that we needed it for different little processes in our body and what would happen if we didn't have it. And that took us a while to figure out. That makes sense, okay. In the time of the crusades, there was an epidemic of what was likely, again, just by description, was likely scurvy. And it was actually triggered by the lintin fast, when soldiers ate little in general. They ate no meat, they ate eel instead of meat. And it actually, because it was, at the time of this fast, it was linked back to the eel.

People thought that it was related to eating eel, because it was believed that eel eat dead people, eels eat dead people. Okay. And so they thought that I don't think that's true. So they thought that eating an eel would then make you, you know, make like you rot, like your gum's rot and putry and stuff because eel's eat it, eels ate dead things. Anyway, but there's a lot of descriptions of barber

surgeons cutting away a lot of dead gum tissue. Yikes. Yeah, which is pretty gross. That's the worst thing. It was really in the 1400s when we start to develop like the sailing technology to keep ships at sea for very long voyages. All right. That we start to see Scurvy is a real problem because now we have a bunch of guys, usually a bunch of guys locked on the ship, not locked, but I don't know where they're going to go. It's great, their eyes will be locked. Nature's my perfect cat, prison.

For a very long time, and they don't have access usually to fresh fruit and vegetable. And so you start to see vitamin deficiencies. And sometimes you could make the case because of this connection that in some descriptions of scurvy, historically, what we're really describing is probably a lot of different vitamin deficiencies. Because these sailors did not have a very very diet. All they did is they were falling apart. Right.

And so sometimes where you may see descriptions of scurvy that have things attributed to them, that may have been vitamin D deficiency or vitamin B deficiency or other vitamin deficiencies as well. What do they call vitamin B deficiency? It depends on which one. There's Barry Barry and there's Pologra. There are different types of vitamin B and yeah. Vascode de Gama, who of course was looking for a route to the East Indies by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, he lost a hundred of his 160 men to scurvy. Yeah, he is. So it was a huge problem when we start to look at these long, sea voyages.

And there are many, many, really explicit descriptions of scurvy from these trips, from the doctors aboard these ships, or just from the men aboard these ships. There is a poem that I stumbled across. And I don't want to read you the entire poem. It's by Luis Dick Camons, who wrote about, in the 1400s, wrote about Scurvy. But there's some, like I said,

there's some really crazy descriptions from this time period. Like, ghastly the mouth and gums enormous swelled and instant putrid like a dead man's wound, poisoned with fetid streams, the air round. It's really very dramatic stuff. Beautiful stuff. Really lovely, I would say DeGama for example had no idea what to do what this was or what to do for all of his sailors who were dying so he advised that they start drinking their own urine. Does urine have vitamin C in it? that they start drinking their own urine. Does urine have vitamin C in it?

If you could, if your vitamin C deficient, no. But if you take extra vitamin C, yes. I would not say that it was helpful in this case. Right. Magellan probably lost about half of his crew on three different ships to Skurvy. It must have thought was curses, right? I'm sure that that was part of the thought the thought there were lots of there were a lot

I don't we'll get into that there were lots of theories as to what was happening but yes there was a lot about bad luck and and curses and and you know that kind of a lot of superstition surrounding scurvy but that did you know this about Magellan that he had three ships 250 men and then in total only 18 returned. Oh my god. I don't know that. Now not all of those were lost to Scurvy, but most of them were about half of them were. That's bad luck. Cartier lost so many men on his voyages to Scurvy.

And it was so horrible to watch that he actually had an autopsy done on one of the men on his ship to try to figure out what was going on, which is interesting for the time period that somebody was thinking, I don't know, let's cut this person open and see if we can figure it out. I was some advance thinking. And there's some writing about what they found, some green and black lungs and a withered heart

and a jug full of red, date-colored water around it, but they didn't really figure it out. It was the grinch. It was pretty much the grinch. It was the grinch. His heart did not manage to grow three sizes though. Sadly. Cardiard also wrote that he found a man named Dom Agaya,

who claimed that he had recovered from scurvy himself by boiling the branches of the ineditry and then drinking the water. And so Cardiard ordered his men to do so and it actually cured those who were suffering from scurvy. Wow. And it's probably, now there's been some debate as to exactly what tree were referencing

because that's an outdated name. We know it today. We know it today is the orange juice tree. No. It was just some kind of pine tree that had a lot of vitamin C in its needles. That's fine too. But exactly which evergreen it was I don't really know Still with all this between 1500 and 1800 scurvy is the leading cause of navel death not battle Not just scurvy cool because it's like inevitable and it's like secret socks and where everybody's getting it exactly

And it's by like orders of magnitude like like there's like how many how many men died in battle? It was like a thousand or so. And then how many men died of scurvy? It was like a hundred thousand or so. I mean, it was lots of people were dying of scurvy. And the doctors had lots of ideas about that. Maybe it was bad air. We've talked about this before, the idea that, you know, you just go out there where the mermaids are

and all of a sudden the air quality dips. Yeah, well, because of the mermaids. Well, not because of the mermaids. It's like, well, mermaid country, air's going to be bad out here. I don't remember them covering that in the little mermaid. No, well, she didn't go up to long enough up to the seat to our level. Oh, she didn't even understand air.

That's how dumb she was. Okay, I don't think you understood the story of the little mermaid, but we'll cover that some time. This is like water. I can't float in. I hate this, I just remembered, I can't sing. Cause which stole my voice, oh god, I'm still singing. This is a great rewrite.

As Al making cut that one out. So that one good enough for the movie. We'll work on this a little bit later. Come up with like our, our. I don't think it's a good start though. The Little Mermaid fanfic musical about scurvy yeah okay great the the roughly the rest you prince Eric right just shoving limes in his mouth well that would have been a bad plan and I'll tell

you why whoa okay cool soon but as I was saying the doctors had lots of ideas they thought maybe it was lack of oxygen. Maybe it was thick blood, maybe sugar caused it. Maybe it was melancholy. Guys got sad when they were out on boats for a long time. Everybody just happened to get sad at the exact same time. The turning point was really after Sir George Anson attempted to sail around the globe. Sailor on the globe, he did, he didn't just. In 1740, that people realized this was a big deal. It took him four years and he lost 1,400 men largely to scurvy. Wow.

And this was such a dramatic event and it was so well covered when he returned, finally, that it led to the age of scurvy research where we see people starting to look into what was causing it. Huh. Interesting. And it turned out oranges the whole time.

Or the lack of oranges. Well, I'll get to that, spoilers. But why don't we go to the billing department first. How's that a spoiler? I don't know oranges. Let's go. The medicines, the medicines that I skilled at my cards before the mouth. oranges. Let's go. So you were going to tell me about oranges.

So when we the the real big breakthrough with scurvy. No, hold on. All right. The breakthrough with scurvy comes with James Lund. He was a surgeon aboard the HMS Salisbury that and he he really uncovered the secret, not the secret that that book is about. No. I still haven't uncovered, because I haven't read that book. He did use the secret. He did use the secret to find the secret answer to scurvy.

I can only assume that's true. You made a vision board with pictures of people hunched over. I don't think that's true. But he had a question, like it was a picture of a ship with a bunch of dead bodies on it and just like question marks over it on its vision board and it's just like, how, how, why, where, what is happening? They used to seek it and a lot of attraction just found it.

He found the answer. Like attracts likes hidden. So if you put positive energy out of the world, that's what you're gonna get coming back to you. Is that sort of like Shia is that sort of like Sherlock with his mind palace? Similar to that except it's an immutable law of the universe not like gravity or That it it's round

That's the law of the universe is that it's round a lot of attraction. We'll work on that later Is a law a natural law like those, and that law states that like checks like such as you put positive, scurvy curing energy in the woods. I don't know that I believe in any of this. Well, you don't need to believe in until law. Well, you don't believe in traffic.

Lawson, we're still gonna stop at those old red lights, you know? Let's just stick to scurvy. I think that's the thing that I can officially talk about. Scurvy struck the ship on which Jameland was a surgeon in 1747 when it was in the English channel. And there were 12 men who were quite sick and he began to experiment on them, which I guess we can excuse considering nobody else knew what to do for scurvy so at least he was trying something. He broke

them up into six groups of two each and he gave each group either vinegar, cider, elixir of vitriol, nutmeg, seawater, or oranges and lemons. Uh oh. Yes. See what this is going on. So, he compared all the groups, the guys who ate the fruit got better very quickly. Now, was this on a boat? Yeah. Okay. HMS Salisbury.

Right. Okay, now I'm remembering that. He declared at that point, this is a problem with something with citrus. They need these fresh fruits, citrus fruits oranges and lemon specifically still not understanding Of course vitamin C by any stretch, but he knew that this is what yeah, this is what people needed now to be fair He also included because he he published this a treatise on scurvy in 1753 that really I mean change the game so to speak for scurvy But he also mentioned that he thought things like dampness and depression and crowding and the fact that there were also a fresh vegetables were problems

uh... but among that he got the important thing it's hard is in the woods yeah it's hard to believe it could be something simple i guess now here's the crazy thing one it took over forty years for the navy to act on it and to it seems like for a while, the cure kind of got lost. What?

Like, he specifically compared things that were acidic to oranges and lemons, because there was this belief that maybe it had to do with like not enough acid, so if you had ate something that was acidic, it would work, and that would work sometimes, oranges and lemons, but not other times for things like, like he had them have cider, and it would work sometimes, oranges and lemons, but not other times for things like he had

them have cider, and it wouldn't work. So he specifically compared acidic things to prove that it wasn't the acid. But for some reason, he did this, people listened and went, very interesting, okay, that's great. And then went back to trying more acidic foods. For instance, a food that is more acidic is a lime. Now, limes have much less vitamin C than lemons. I did not know that. Yes, that is true. Secondly, they weren't giving sailors fresh limes. They were giving them lime juice. So it was extracted from the limes,

exposed to the air, held in something that contained copper and The the long a short of it is that the less vitamin C that limes already contained was even less end by the process that it went through So they really weren't very very helpful with the lime juice. Hmm So in the meantime other stuff started to become popular So even though we we have figured this out. This is the crazy thing about the story of the circuit We figured it out oranges and lemons give them to sailors, you're good. For a while, we didn't do it. We gave people, well, we're not multi-barley. There was a theory that from David McBride that all bodies are held together with fixed air, and as we decompose, we lose our fixed

air, and that if we have something fermented,mented that it will replace the fixed air which also like I guess is a good reason to drink alcohol I guess I don't know but that if you ate a fermented food like multi-barlier drink Multi-barlie you could replace it which sounds fun, but not you know helpful right or correct real They also in this same time period that we had already figured this out, we're still telling people, I don't know, maybe bloodletting. Just eating the orange. Just, here take this orange, I need it.

No, just drink some salt water. No. Or maybe, you know what, maybe it's just that you're lazy and you need to work a lot harder on the ship and then it'll get better. I, if I were them, I would go on a boat that was gonna go long trip and bring enough oranges for me. If I was them, I would go on a boat that was gonna go along

so I wouldn't bring enough oranges for me. That'll be my secret orange supply. Six months in, I'm running the ship. They do whatever I tell them to do. They do my bidding because they'll be like, king of the ship. Cause they'll all have scurvy and I'll be like, fine. So if you ever, if you need my room,

I'll be in my room eating some orange panacol. If you ever invent time travels, that what you're gonna do? Yeah, no, thing one. Thing one, scoey. Eat a bunch of orange panacol and If you ever invent time travels, what were you going to do? Yeah, no, thing one. Thing one is go eat a bunch of orange panicol in all timey ship while I break it's scurvy around me. That is the weirdest thing that anybody's probably already ever said in response to if you could travel through time, what would you do?

It would be my one thing. The one thing I don't want to do. The other things that were recommended were something called scurvy grass, which was just a kind of grass. It probably wasn't very helpful. There was wild celery, wood sorrel, soup, mustard, sour, grout, molasses, beans, or earth was thought to be helpful. This was like a superstitious belief.

Being out on the sea was sickening. It would make you sick. Return to the Earth. Yeah, return to the Earth and you'll be okay. So there are people who tried to bury themselves in the ground like halfway and see if like just being in case in the earth would be helpful which I mean I guess saved the grave diggers some time on the other end. Yeah, and local kids dark there. Yeah look Rose happy holidays and then local kids kicks in their faces. So that's sad too. So that doesn't work sad too. So that doesn't work. Things changed somewhat in 1795 when Ser Gilbert Blaine, physician to the fleet of the British Navy, repeated some of Lens

experiment by giving all the sailors on one particular long voyage a ration of rum, water, sugar, and lemon juice. Cocktail. Sounds pretty good. I would be on board with this plan. Right, especially kept you can't really forget Scurvy. Most of them didn't get Scurvy and the few who actually did, he gave them extra just lemon juice and they got better. And this led to the widespread use of lemons by the British Navy. Now the weird thing is, it was lemons. Lemons.

But what did it lead to? Famously, that people still think. The, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, that used to be used as a negative slang term to refer to British people in general. There was a cocktail that came from this era. Well, I'm certain it did. I'm making, I'm pulling out my mind. No, I'm talking about the term limey's, which used specifically was for British sailors because of this association that they all were given citrus fruit to take with them on trips, which was a really good idea and I don't know why we were insulting them for it. But then became this generic kind of slang term.

Although it's funny, because when I was reading some of the articles, they all note, now the term limey is embraced by British people as kind of a funny, fun little, which I don't know if that's true or not. So if I have offended anyone by using that term, would have been like I'm sorry I don't think it is but it's wrong too because they weren't get issued rhymes nobody would have been able to hurt my feelings with that either it's like well see you on the

other side I guess how me when you're hunch around like crash around like cosmodo that is not just like looking awesome and swinging around with a saber and like pirating and like stealing other ships and stuff. It was my cool accent. I have told you that it does not cause you to be scrunched over. It's that's a popular thing. No it's not. But the limey thing was and again it was wrong because limes don't have nearly as much vitamin C as lemons do. You're much better off with lemons. Well lemon is like not a, that's not a term. Lemony?

It's not like. Or in fact, like I said, onions would be even better. For instance, during the Civil War, many men, not as good as orange does now, but they're up there on the chart. During the Civil War, there were a lot of men who developed scurvy due to like limited food supplies at the, you know, at the front lines. And there wasn't were a lot of men who developed scurvy due to limited food supplies at the front lines. And there wasn't obviously a lot of citrus fruit, but there were a lot of potatoes and onions. And by now, we didn't know that there was vitamin C, but we knew that they like citrus

fruit could help with scurvy. Potatoes do too, actually. So they collected onions and potatoes and sent them to the front. And this led to for a while, there was a slogan during the Civil War, don't send your sweetheart a love letter, send him an onion. Yeah, I mean, who wouldn't like that nice onion? The problem is where do you put the stamp? So nobody can figure out.

That's is that your great onion joke for the day? That's my great. Send your hubby, an onion,? That's my great onion joke. Senor Abbey, an onion ill find it very revealing. Senor Minanian, it's the one thoughtful gift guaranteed to make them cry. That's a not bad one. That's that one's actually very good. Okay, I'll give you that one. I'll give you that one.

It wasn't until, so even with this adoption of all of this with vitamin C, it wasn't until 1907, Wynland's experiment was again repeated in a lab and published again by scientists that, you know what, we definitely believe that there is something in citrus fruit that fixes scurvy, even though it was being used anecdotally and by local doctors on all these different levels. And even though it had been adopted by that British Navy, it was still not widespread until 1907, which is crazy, because we had the cure in 1753.

Yeah, that's a weird thing about it. I wonder how they, it seems like it would be a hard thing to do a lab experiment on. It seems like nutritional deficiencies would be really hard to control for. It would. That's why you get so many descriptions of scurvy that are actually also rickets or also berry-berry or something.

That's why you get so many nutritional deficiencies. I just don't know how you would keep people from doing that in their day-to-day lives. I mean, if they're not on a ship. It was very difficult. I don thinking I pay people money, maybe. I have to pay them to not eat anything citrusy while they're not at the lab. Yeah. I'm sure you could do that. Yeah, I'm worried. Now, we actually didn't figure out, like I mentioned, that vitamin C was the culprit until we figured out what vitamin C was,

and that was in the 1930s. And as you know, as we've talked about vitamin C before, it has been wildly popular ever since. So you don't see as much scurvy nowadays. It is possible. There are cases of scurvy. It's not eliminated by any of us could get scurvy at any time if we stopped eating vitamin C. But it's certainly not as common as it used to be. I want to say this right now, never gonna stop. Never gonna stop eating vitamin C? Well, I mean, that's good, because you'll get scurvy if you do. I'll never gonna stop.

Don't think you can change it. Okay, no, I don't want you to, because you'll get scurvy. I remember, I told you that part. Thanks to Maximum Fun for letting us be a part of their network. There's a lot of great shows you can go here at MaximumFun.org. Sort of last notice here, we're doing a show December 21st on Monday, 8 p.m. on the Tommas Virginia, the big city super store arena. If you can get by there, it's going to be fun.

It's Kalonites, it's us and my brother, my brother, me and it's going to be a hoot nanny, I think. Or a hoot and a holler. I think that's going to do for us. It takes the taxpayers to let us use your song medicines as the intra-natural rubber program. And thank you so much to you, sir. This episode was a little late. You know, holidays and sickness and all the other excuses that we all have to keep our podcast late. But we hope you enjoy it and don't get scurvy. Don't get scurvy. So eat all those set sumas and And the orange pentaculture, come over and just have orange pentaculture.

Are your Christmas lemons, traditional Christmas lemons? Why do you just do that, girl? I'm Zidney Magra. He's always, don't do it. Oh, in your head. Alright! Maximumfund.org Comedy and Culture, Artistone Listener Supported