Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters | 22 April 2006

Everyone knows the story of James Lind - except they don't

issue 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.

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