Voyage of discovery

ANDREW LAMBERT devours a rich historical account of the debilitating effects of vitamin deficiency

Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery by Jonathan Lamb Princeton University, 328 pages, £24.95

Scurvy is a debilitating disease commonly associated with oceanic voyages, arctic travel and desert expeditions in the heroic era of exploration. Vitamin deficiency, especially that of vitamin C, weakens and mortifies the bodies and minds of men (who were more prone to the complaint than women) or boys. For centuries, the causes were debated: Captain Scott’s ill-fated attempt to reach the south pole suffered because the prevailing wisdom of the day attributed the complaint to poisoning. Only in the 1930s did the isolation of vitamins provide a scientific rationale, examined in a compelling coda.

This much will be familiar to discoverers, across oceans or pages, yet the medical history is merely the surface detail of a complaint that causes physical damage to the brain, bringing on visions and hyper-real sensory experiences, loosening men’s minds as it loosens their teeth. Scurvy consumes all aspects of the human experience, its effects found in explorers’ written records and in imaginative literature, culture and art.

Jonathan Lamb brings a literary sensibility and a traveller’s zest for distant places to Scurvy, enveloping his readers in layers of meaning drawn from travel narratives, fiction, poetry, medical writing, art and philosophy. The fluid mass of interconnected perspectives – from Homer to Herman Melville, James Cook to Robert Falcon Scott – produces

a critical realisation. The scorbutic witness cannot explain what they see, feel or taste; their experience is absolute and impenetrable to healthy minds.

Lamb also examines the early settlement of Australia, which was dominated by scurvy. The First Fleet arrived laden with sickly convicts and the lack of fresh vegetables, fruit, fish or meat led to decades of agony. Long-term mental health problems were only one of the predictable outcomes.

As complex, rich and compelling as the disease it examines, Lamb’s book demands we reconsider the experience of exploration.