Medicine and letters | 22 April 2006

I was about to write ‘Everyone knows the story of James Lind, the Scottish naval surgeon, who conducted the first controlled trial in the history of medicine to prove the curative value of citrus fruits in scurvy’ when I realised that it would have been a silly and, worse still, a snobbish thing to say. After all, my clinical experience suggests that a good, or should I say a bad, percentage of British youth does not know the date of a single great historical event, such as the Battle of Hastings or David Beckham’s marriage, let alone has any familiarity with medical history which, however glorious and uplifting, must always remain a minority interest even in the best-educated households.

Actually, I don’t think the antiquarian bookseller in the large French provincial city where I bought the French translation of Lind’s great work, A Treatise of the Scurvy, had heard of Lind either. He looked at me over the upper rim of those gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose, so well-suited to the superciliousness with which some antiquarian booksellers regard their unworthy customers whom they suspect to be insufficiently intellectual. But he didn’t know who Lind was.

The French translation was published in 1756, the year of the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, only three years after Lind published it in Edinburgh. The anonymous translator’s preface is an encomium to Lind’s refusal to be misled by the theories of his predecessors, and his reliance on accurate observation. There is not a word about the enmity between Britain and France, the progress of science being a far greater thing.

Lind’s famous experiment was as follows: he took 12 cases of scurvy, ‘as similar as I could have them’, and divided them into six groups of two.