thinkin’ some thoughts today

This showed up on my pinboard network this week, and — since it seems I’m destined to bring up scurvy in at least 90% of my writing — I was of course interested.

Scott and Scurvy, by Maciej Cegłowski over at Idle Words

It’s a longish exploration of the history of scurvy, which — as this article mentions — I remember showing up in school as a brief “we figured out how to fix it and it was never a problem again” type of footnote. Not quite that simple, it turns out. It was an interesting read overall, but I particularly enjoyed the conclusions (what can I say, I like summaries), including this one:

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world – depression, autism, hypertension, obesity – will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.