If you've been looking for a good book on Scurvy...

...you might try Stephen R. Bown's book by that name.

I picked up a copy at the used bookstore in the Milwaukee airport on my way to Hawaii in March, read a fair bit of it despite some comments from certain elements out there, and have just now finished it.

Bown's prose isn't up to Shakespeare's or Dashiell Hammett's, but it's a good read and gives one an idea of just how awful a scourge scurvy was, and how miserably long it took to figure out how to prevent and cure it.

Scurvy apparently wasn't a factor in sailing until the months-long sea voyages following Columbus's voyage. While practical mariners figured out by the very late 16th century that fresh vegetables and citrus fruits did the trick, theorists actually got it wrong and still managed to put an end to proper treatment until near the end of the 18th century. The 17th and eighteenth centuries were ugly years for sailors.

Captain Cook figured out how to prevent scurvy during his three voyages of Pacific discovery, but he wasn't systematic enuf in his experiment, and muddled the results. The British navy sailed onward, scurvy ridden, until the 1790s. Then, however, they got it right with a vengeance with plenty of daily citrus juice, and that clearly affected the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars: The Brit ships could stay on station for months, blockading French ports to prevent the French Navy from escaping and ferrying troops to invade England. The Battle of Trafalgar likely was affected by scurvy among the French crews, and lack of it among the British.