Vitamin C and the common cold but it has halved the frequency of colds in people under heavy short-term physical stress. There is no effect of taking vitamin C in doses up to 8 grams per day after a cold has already begun. Vitamin C was identified in the early part of the twentieth century, and there was much interest in its possible effects on various infections including the common cold. A few controlled trials on the effect of vitamin C on the common cold were carried out already in the 1940s, the earliest of these appears to be a placebo-controlled trial published in 1945. The
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