Nostalgia

This chapter explores the range of reflective possibilities available to scorbutic memoirists as they try to reach a public dwelling on the other side of the situation. It shows how, in the exigencies of scorbutic experience, being alone and far from home do not in themselves excite homesickness; but to be stuck inside a dream of home that corresponds to none that exists, or to go back home under the influence of such an illusion and to have it shattered, these conform to a definition of homesickness first offered by Johannes Hofer and recently refurbished by Helmut Illbruck to the effect that it arises from a lesion of the imagination resulting in a reverie entirely without a referent.

Coda

This chapter discusses the neurological basis of scurvy. The physical symptoms of extreme vitamin C deficiency, i.e., scurvy, have been described in numerous ships' logs, diaries, and medical texts, stretching back for hundreds of years. Examples include hemorrhage, and the characteristic broken blood vessels under the skin; and hyperkeratosis, or changes in hair such as thinning, alopecia, and corkscrew hairs on the limbs. However, modern techniques in neuroscience research have revealed the highly complex roles of vitamin C in the brain, which may have changed the behavior of those experiencing long periods of nutritional deficiencies. The most important roles for vitamin C, also known as ascorbate and ascorbic acid, are in the synthesis of neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers of the brain, and for protection of neurons (brain cells) against damage by a constant barrage of free radicals.

Enigma

The history of scurvy is heavily marked by the conflict of interests between those who dwell inside the drama and those who don't. The biochemical breakthrough that isolated ascorbic acid and explained its physiological and neurological importance to the human organism was never aligned with the history of empirical knowledge of the disease. That is to say, biochemistry and naval medicine never shared an inevitable and common destination, although there were many occasions when a coalition of the two was accidentally and briefly achieved. This chapter shows that it is difficult for anyone outside the disorganized and passionate situation of scurvy itself not to consider its history as anything but 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.

Prolegomena

This chapter presents a background on scurvy. Scurvy's first attested appearance in literature is found in Luis Vaz de Camoens's The Lusiads (1572), a poem celebrating Vasco da Gama's expedition into the Indian Ocean. The fundamental difference between scurvy and other epidemic maladies during the age of discovery revolves around the mutant gene that fails to prompt the synthesis of ascorbate in the human body. Scurvy is not caused by the entry of bacteria or viruses into the organism, nor by parasites nestling in a human host; scurvy occurs because the body has not absorbed in sufficient quantity a chemical habitually ingested and crucial to the functioning of the nerves, blood, bone, cartilage, and tissue. In this respect, it resembles other illnesses that arise because of the deficiency of a necessary biochemical agent, such as caries, rickets, or goiter.

Genera Mixta

This chapter discusses how fiction, and the genre of romance in particular, supplies the scorbutic imagination with models suitable for “peculiarity.” Having suggested in Chapter 4 that there may be something like an aesthetics of the dazzled eye, it explores the possibility of a connection between that and the genres of scorbutic literature. The histories of scurvy and fiction arrive at a curious junction in the work of Trotter and Beddoes. In their later work on the nervous temperament, they cite novels not so much as an epistemological or aesthetic blemish on modern culture but as a significant challenge to public health. Earlier in the century, George Cheyne estimated nervous diseases as comprising a third of all maladies; but by the beginning of the nineteenth century, they had grown and diversified so rapidly that, according to Trotter, they represented two-thirds of the whole catalogue.

Australia

This chapter focuses on the settlement of Australia, a notable example of a landfall that provided none of voluptuous satisfactions generally associated with the Indian Ocean or the South Seas, although many of those coming ashore were scurvied, especially after the arrival of the second fleet. As a joint experiment in penology and colonization, it was utterly novel, being as far from England as it was possible to get and consisting of unreconnoitred territory where no previous European settlement had been made. It was on all fronts a monstrous gamble that easily could have failed because scurvy had not been factored into any of the arrangements for making the trip.

Effluvia

Loathsome and dangerous diseases are traditionally associated with foreignness, which plunges those who succumb to them into the loneliness of a castaway or the solitude of an unwelcome stranger. This is especially evident in scurvy. This chapter examines this foreignness under the heading of scientific experiment. It discusses how the doctrine of effluvia provided a model for those who understood sensation—and life itself—as a flux and reflux of matter in which losses are being perpetually made up. It then turns to the paradoxical role of science in the history of scurvy; on the one side, it contributes to the increase of the disease by advancing the art and machinery of navigation to the degree that voyages become too long for the human organism to sustain and, on the other, it promises instruments so ingeniously conceived and cleverly constructed that the measure of time and space is made certain, so that voyagers would always know where they were.