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.
