Citrus Before Certainty: Evidence bureaucracy and sailors lives

The cure for scurvy did not travel in a straight line from discovery to adoption. Reports, experiments, competing theories, supply problems, and administrative resistance shaped what sailors actually received at sea. Focusing on the movement of medical knowledge through navies and merchant fleets, this book explores why useful practices could be forgotten, doubted, or implemented inconsistently. It connects changing ideas about disease with the practical realities of provisioning and preservation. The story reveals how institutions learn, how evidence gains authority, and why thousands of lives can depend on decisions made far from the suffering they address.