Scurvy
The Disease of Discovery
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
An intellectual history of scurvy in the eighteenth century
Scurvy, a disease often associated with long stretches of maritime travel, generated sensations exceeding the standard of what was normal. Eyes dazzled, skin was morbidly sensitive, emotions veered between disgust and delight. In this book, Jonathan Lamb presents an intellectual history of scurvy unlike any other, probing the speechless encounter with powerful sensations to tell the story of the disease that its victims couldn't because they found their illness too terrible and, in some cases, too exciting.
Drawing on historical accounts from scientists and voyagers as well as major literary works, Lamb traces the cultural impact of scurvy during the eighteenth-century age of geographical and scientific discovery. He explains the medical knowledge surrounding scurvy and the debates about its cause, prevention, and attempted cures. He vividly describes the phenomenon and experience of "scorbutic nostalgia," in which victims imagined mirages of food, water, or home, and then wept when such pleasures proved impossible to consume or reach. Lamb argues that a culture of scurvy arose in the colony of Australia, which was prey to the disease in its early years, and identifies a literature of scurvy in the works of such figures as Herman Melville, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Francis Bacon, and Jonathan Swift.
Masterful and illuminating, Scurvy shows how the journeys of discovery in the eighteenth century not only ventured outward to the ends of the earth, but were also an inward voyage into the realms of sensation and passion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lamb (The Things Things Say), professor of the humanities at Vanderbilt University, surveys the ravages of a nutritional disease that for centuries stalked the ships that sailed in search of new lands and treasure. Scurvy imbued the literature of the time even as its diagnosis and treatment remained maddeningly elusive. Physician James Lind's controlled trial in 1747 found that citrus fruits cured scurvy, but over time that treatment fell out of favor in the face of competing ideas about the disease's provenance. Expertly researched and richly written, Lamb's study tracks the links in sufferers' unusual symptoms heightened senses, cravings, and emotions that became known as "scorbutic nostalgia," as well as a ghastly physical breakdown through naval logs, physicians' journals, and literature. The disease's first appearance in print occurred in 1572 in a poem celebrating Vasco da Gama's expedition into the Indian Ocean. It also popped up in John Milton's Paradise Lost, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Herman Melville's Omoo, and the poetry of Coleridge. The history of the devastating deficiency, Lamb argues, is one of "periodic fits of willful ignorance that blinded the world to a necessary truth and an obvious cure: a dismal record then of lost opportunities and culpable amnesias." Lamb's rigorously scholastic and elegantly lyrical account should intrigue both historians and literary critics.
