Lemon juice for the Royal Navy

During his first two years at Haslar Hospital, James Lind saw 1,146 cases of scurvy among 5,743 patients. He had tested remedies on 12 scorbutic sailors aboard HMS Salisbury in May 1747 and published his Treatise of the Scurvy in 1753. The navy did not act on it. In 1754 its Sick and Hurt Board turned down a proposal to supply sailors with fruit juice.

Other remedies competed. Lind's preserved juice, a rob made by concentrating diluted juice at near boiling heat, lost much of its power, since heat destroys vitamin C. In 1776 Captain James Cook, in a paper for the Royal Society, promoted malt wort over lemon rob, and his word carried great weight.

Gilbert Blane (1749 to 1834) had entered the navy already holding a medical degree and was physician to Lord Rodney's fleet in the Caribbean during the American War of Independence. In 1785 he published Observations on the Diseases Incident to Seamen. By one account, in 1793 a fleet bound for India on his advice carried plenty of lemon juice preserved with alcohol and reached Madras free of scurvy after nineteen weeks without putting into port. Blane, by then a commissioner of the Sick and Hurt Board, used that result to persuade the Admiralty in 1795 to sanction lemon juice on a far more generous scale than ever before. He still blamed scurvy partly on sloth, damp, filth and cold.

The disease fell away. It is said that when the First Lord of the Admiralty visited Haslar in 1797 and asked to see a scurvy patient, none could be found. In 1815 Blane reported figures from John Lind, James's son and successor at Haslar: only two cases of scurvy had been sent to the hospital in the last four years of the Napoleonic Wars.