Scurvy and the discovery of vitamin C

It was during long-distance voyages from the 15th century onwards that the typical symptoms of a mysterious disease were isolated: scurvy , which affected sailors on these distant expeditions and which would lead to the discovery of vitamins, particularly vitamin C or ascorbic acid .

We now know that vitamin C is directly involved in the synthesis of proteins including collagen and that scurvy is mainly a degeneration of connective tissues linked to its deficiency.

We tell you this exciting story.

Seafarers' Disease: Vitamin C Deficiency

The term scurvy comes from a medieval Icelandic word for its symptoms.

It is likely that the Viking sailors, who were sailing long distances long before the southern Europeans, were the first to be affected.

Until the end of the 15th century, in Western and Mediterranean Europe (as well as in the rest of the world), navigation was limited to coastal shipping and thus to a diet for sailors identical or almost identical to that of landlubbers, with a proportion of fresh vegetables.

It was only with the long, non-stop voyages initiated by Christopher Columbus that we discovered this mysterious illness that struck the crews.

At that time, it was impossible to keep fresh food on board: after a few weeks at sea, the sailors' food became exclusively based on salted meats and biscuits.

The ravages of scurvy are the number one problem of these expeditions, with frightening statistics:

• Vasco De Gama (1497) who sailed beyond the Cape of Good Hope lost 120 sailors out of 160 in 11 months at sea, with the first deaths appearing after 4 months;
• Magellan's circumnavigation of the world (1519) saw only about twenty sailors return from the 265 who set out.
• The sad documented record, however, belongs to the English Admiral Anson (1740/1744) who lost nearly 1,800 of the 2,000 men on board during his round-the-world voyage.

Before succumbing to excruciating pain, the sailors are gradually affected and quickly become unable to carry out their duties: the affected crews are largely inoperable, which further adds to the dangers of their navigation.

Symptoms of scurvy

They are gradually put in place after a few months of sailing and a diet excluding all forms of fresh vegetables: ship biscuits and salted meats are the only food on board.

The first symptoms of extreme vitamin C deficiency are general weakness:

• Increasing fatigue
• Loss of appetite and weight.

This is followed by joint and muscle pain, then edema and swelling of the limbs and a cadaverous pallor.

The next stage affects the gums, which soften, bleed, and loosen the teeth. The patient's breath becomes foul-smelling. Death occurs as a result of internal bleeding.

The entire process can take several weeks.

The affected crews are obviously largely "out of service". The English supremacy on the oceans at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century (Battle of Trafalgar etc.), is largely explained by the better health of the British crews who benefited from lemon rations, well before those of other nations.

The development of scurvy: Watercolour by Henry H Mahon (1841) (National Archives UK).

The empirical solution thanks to citrus fruits

The French explorer Jacques Cartier, while sailing up the Saint Lawrence in 1535, noticed that the crew suffering from scurvy had been cured by drinking herbal infusions brought by the Indians on the shore.

In its early stages, scurvy lesions are in fact reversible with the intake of vitamin C.

It was the English naval doctor James Lind, in the mid ^-18th century, who highlighted the role of citrus fruits in preventing the onset of scurvy and curing the symptoms, after testing several other food solutions and concluding: " I observed that the result of all my experiments was that oranges and lemons were the most effective remedies for this disease at sea."

The delicate problem of on-board conservation was resolved a few years later: at the end of the ^18th century, the daily ration of English sailors included a drink of lemon juice mixed with alcohol.

This advantage was such that it was classified as a "defense secret" for more than half a century: it allowed the English to maintain more than 100,000 crewmen at sea, in good physical condition and largely explains the domination and successes of the English navy (Aboukir, Trafalgar) against crews smaller in number and strength!

It was not until 1850 (!) that the French navy made lemon juice rations widespread.

The discovery of vitamins B and C

It was gradually understood that tiny quantities of unknown elements present in certain fresh foods played key roles in physiology and that the body did not function or functioned less well in their presence.

In 1887, a Dutch doctor (Dr. Eijkman) noticed, in Indonesia, nervous and cardiac pathological signs ('beriberi') affecting chickens fed with white rice (without the husk or integument) while chickens fed with whole rice did not have these problems.
There is a substance in rice bran that protects these animals from nervous and cardiac disorders.

It was the Japanese Suzuki who identified the substance responsible for preventing beriberi (and thus called aberic acid , then Thiamine), and the Polish Funk who isolated it in 1911 and created the generic term Vitamin resulting from the contraction of "vital" and "amine" which corresponds to the molecular structure of thiamine.

Funk and Eijkman would win the 1929 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of vitamin B1.

Identification of vitamin C to treat scurvy

At the beginning of the 20th century, two Norwegian doctors had already highlighted the role of fresh fruits and vegetables in preventing scurvy , but it was the Hungarian Albert Szent-Györgyi who isolated ascorbic acid ('preventing scurvy').

He succeeded in extracting it from paprika and demonstrated its antioxidant and anti-scorbutic role in the body. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1937.

Szent György's work led to fundamental advances in understanding the biological mechanisms of energy production, which were finalized in the 1950s by Sir Krebs, through the conceptualization of the energy cycle that bears his name.

Szent György continued his research, notably through the National Foundation for Cancer Research that he created and which was at the origin of numerous studies on the importance of antioxidants in cancer prevention in the 1970s. 

A new era: the commercialization of vitamin C

From 1934, Hoffmann-La Roche laboratories produced and marketed vitamin C under the name Redoxon, opening a new era in the history of global food: nutraceuticals were born.

But that's another story...