Two cases of scurvy treated in town
A Maisonneuve-Rosemont doctor has been shocked to find two cases of scurvy in his hospital over the last month, it being a disease of extreme deficiency rarely seen here even in a long medical practice.
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Kate
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nau 12:31 on 2021-03-01 Permalink
Back in the day, I knew a punk from Sault Ste. Marie who (like all wise people) decided that all this politically correct vegetarian nonsense had gone too far and that, as a protest, he would henceforth only eat meat. He was pretty happy about this at first but after a few months wasn’t feeling so well. The doctor congratulated him for being the only person they’d encountered who’d managed to give himself scurvy, and many laughs were had at his expense. Sadly, these cases don’t fall into the “You dumb fuck” category but result rather from the collision of social isolation and mental disturbance with the pandemic.
Tee Owe 13:30 on 2021-03-01 Permalink
Humans (homo sapiens) are omnivores – don’t fight biology!
dwgs 16:34 on 2021-03-01 Permalink
nau, care to give any hints about said punk’s identity? Initials even? Timeline? That’s my hometown and now I’m busy trying to guess who it might have been. I have a couple of suspects.
nau 17:59 on 2021-03-01 Permalink
Didn’t know him well, he was a friend of a friend. I crossed paths with him in the early 90s in Vancouver. The scurvy happened later in the 90s after he went back to the Soo. The name that comes back to me is Gary. Stocky guy maybe 5′ 10″ish, extroverted, with 90s facial hair. I remember him telling me his favourite band was the Dwarves. Does that help? (Full disclosure, I relayed the story as it was told to me. I can’t attest to its veracity, but having met the guy it was well within the realm of plausibility.)
dwgs 08:19 on 2021-03-02 Permalink
Ah, probably a few years younger than me, no doubt I know someone who knows him. I thought it was someone who had moved to MTL. The only thing that surprises me is that he moved back.
nau 09:23 on 2021-03-02 Permalink
Yeah, the Ontarians didn’t paint a pretty picture of Sault Ste. Marie but having grown up in a smaller, more isolated industrial town, it didn’t sound that out out of the ordinary to me. I think he moved back east because he got tired of how “progressive” the west coast was, but it’s entirely possible he went to Toronto and it’s just my wonky memory that situates him back in the Soo.
Kate 10:56 on 2021-03-02 Permalink
nau, the guy in your story managed to replicate the diet of meat and ship’s biscuit that left so many sailors ill or dead from scurvy before a Scots surgeon discovered that giving them a bit of citrus fruit cured the condition. It was some time before other scientists worked out the chemical formula for Vitamin C.
jeather 12:38 on 2021-03-02 Permalink
My favourite short history of scurvy and the discovery and loss and rediscovery of its cure.
Kate 12:53 on 2021-03-02 Permalink
Maciej Ceglowski is such a good writer. Thanks, jeather.
nau 15:02 on 2021-03-02 Permalink
That’s a great article Jeather.
After posting the story, my brain started torturing me with a composite of all the chauvinistic meat-eaters I’ve ever met asking “So why don’t the Inuit get scurvy, huh?”. So I poked around and stumbled across a Canadian explorer who demonstrated the viability of a virtually all-meat diet: Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
The catch is the meat has to be very fresh to contain enough Vitamin C (raw is best), which is why the sailors’ preserved meat didn’t do the trick. So I guess we’re stuck with clementines unless we want to follow the Japanese in eating horse sashimi.