Vitamin C and the common cold by 18%. Severity was also reduced. However, if vitamin C was started only when the first symptoms of a cold were being felt, there were no benefits for duration or severity. Vitamin C and the common cold The common cold, or simply cold, is a viral infectious disease of the upper respiratory tract. The cold is indeed common, and is a significant cause for absences from work and school. Even before the discovery of vitamin C, folklore had it that certain fruits were effective in both preventing and treating the cold. After scientific identification of vitamin C in the early
Scurvy It was mainly by scurvy that George Anson, in his celebrated voyage of 1740–1744, lost nearly two-thirds of his crew (1,300 out of 2,000) within the first 10 months of the voyage. The Royal Navy enlisted 184,899 sailors during the Seven Years' War; 133,708 of these were "missing" or died from disease, and scurvy was the leading cause. Although throughout this period sailors and naval surgeons were increasingly convinced that citrus fruits could cure scurvy, the classically trained physicians who ran the medical establishment dismissed this evidence as mere anecdote which did not conform to current theories of disease. Literature