The speech of his life

Chik Collins
on the greatest oratory of Jimmy Reid: not the rectorial address

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The Cafe

Stewart Hendry and Mike Bailey

A juicy story

David Harvie
How it was discovered that lemons are good for you

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The Cafe
David Mackenzie and
Miller Caldwell

Transferable skulls

Robin Downie
Can we all be managed in the great cause of efficiency?

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Rear Window
Ian Mackenzie on a man who
broke all the rules

The Cafe

I have just read Bill Boyd on ‘Losing Our Language’ (SR 309) and I thought of the old tale of Nero and his fiddle. The parallel is for me especially apt since Bill chooses Reporting Scotland to illustrate the crime. In that case he picks on a questionable gnat while ignoring a number of very obstreperous camels.
     Language is a live and growing invention, not a fragile structure to be protected by the sniffing out of minor heresies. The existing pressures for orthodoxy are actually very strong, as witness the absurd reluctance to use the more precise ‘yous’ (or y’all) for the plural of ‘you’. They don’t need further bolstering by fussy rearguard action.

David Mackenzie

 

Every now and then I walk past Dumfries Post Office, a grand building but sold some three years ago. The toon’s main postal services can be found at the back of the Spar shop in the Whitesands these days.
     It is a secret what will become of the former postal building. Nobody knows who now owns it except for the ubiquitous Shepherds’ board above the front door. But plasterers are freshening the walls. Carpenters are slicing wood. Opened vans are parked in front servicing much activity, yet silence as to the purpose of all this effort.
     But I am sure this is not an uncommon occurrence. After all I opened the ‘Shop’ on the Scottish Review front page. It tells a similar story. ‘Coming soon’. 

Miller Caldwell

A juicy story

David Harvie

HMS Investigator

Our supposedly sophisticated society still has rough experiences with its grasp of science and technology and its ability to bring their benefits to public understanding.
The very recent revelations about the alleged true cause of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 (confusion over contradictory ’tiller rules’ and ‘steamship rules’ for steering) is a classic example. Homoeopathy, nuclear power, genetic modification and, currently, deep-water oil drilling and the consumption of milk and meat from cloned animals all are far from being widely accepted and are likely to inflame conflicting attitudes into the future.

     We probably assume these difficulties to be the product of simple disagreement and controversy, and distinctly of our own time. Yet such uncertainty has always been with us, accompanied by genuine lack of knowledge, misunderstanding and, more than occasionally, wilful disregard. A recent spectacular discovery in Canada – with numerous potent Scottish resonances – has reminded me of a good example from the past, when lessons had not been learned.
     From the 15th century, one of the greatest obsessions of history was the desire to prove the existence of the Northwest Passage – a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In late July, archaeologists from Parks Canada used sonar technology to identify the well-preserved, 157-year-old wreck of HMS Investigator, the ship which is credited as being the first to find the missing link in the passage, following a sledging expedition by Captain Robert McClure on 21 October 1850.
     Lying upright in 30 feet of water in Mercy Bay, Banks Island, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Investigator is a startling discovery for a country that didn’t exist when she was abandoned, locked fast in the Arctic ice, in 1853. Investigator was built at Scott’s in Greenock and fitted out for Arctic service at Blackwall and Woolwich dockyards; many of the most up-to-date hull-strengthening technologies were used, as well as heating, lighting and ventilation systems.

Although it had scandalously taken the admiralty almost 50 years to implement Lind’s proposals, scurvy was finally eradicated within months.

     In 1848, the ship had been part of James Clark Ross’s expedition to find Sir John Franklin’s two ships, Erebus and Terror, which had disappeared in the Arctic ice three years earlier. Franklin’s doomed voyage encouraged many British and American rescue attempts, but when the admiralty commissioned McClure to command an expedition in Investigator in 1850, there were two objectives – discovering Franklin’s fate and the identification of the Northwest Passage.
     Alexander Armstrong, later knighted, elected FRS and appointed director-general of the navy’s medical department, was the expedition’s surgeon and naturalist. Armstrong was acutely aware of the dangers posed by scurvy, the centuries-old terror that had killed over two million sailors and explorers, and tried to ensure that supplies of the most superior lemon juice was provided to the expedition. Fresh lemons and lemon juice had been identified by the Edinburgh-born naval surgeon James Lind in 1747 as the best means of preventing and curing scurvy. His unshakable intention, to ‘confirm all by experience and facts’ led Lind to conduct an extraordinary, first-ever clinical trial – held on board ship at sea – and several years of historical and clinical research and experiment.
     Lind pioneered the modern, progressive concept of evidence-based medicine. Although it had scandalously taken the admiralty almost 50 years to implement Lind’s proposals, scurvy was finally eradicated within months. Catastrophically, and with mind-numbing arrogance, their lordships nevertheless decided that they disliked paying good English money to the foreigners who grew lemons in the Mediterranean when the cash could go to English gentlemen growing limes in the West Indies. When limes replaced lemons, scurvy returned with a vengeance, and no-one seemed willing to consider why.
     The unknown ‘something’ contained in lemons was naïvely assumed also to be present in limes (which the long-dead Lind had not recommended). We now know that limes have about a quarter of the vitamin C content of lemons.
Since vitamins were not identified until after the first world war, there was undeniably a huge gap in earlier knowledge. However, it is inexplicable that simple observation did not result in a return to the use of lemons; and even more mystifying that there continued to be a disastrous conflation of the fruit.
    

‘Learning from past mistakes’ seems to be an often-promised political mantra these days, although realists often react with a cynical shrug, while history nods dolefully from a dark corner.

     Alexander Armstrong, concerned as he undoubtedly was to ensure protection from scurvy, also failed to make vital distinctions. In both his own highly detailed account of the Investigator voyage and in evidence to the official inquiry, he persistently fell into the habit of using the terms ‘lemon juice’ and ‘lime juice’ indiscriminately, as if they were identical.
     Before departure, he had two forms of lemon-juice produced under his supervision at Deptford. The first, fortified by 10% brandy, was the better, while the second form had been subjected to excess boiling, thus partly destroying the vitamin content. Unaccountably, it appears that Armstrong did not distinguish which was therapeutically preferable. In truth, even if only due to the careless use of language, we cannot be certain that Armstrong actually used what he thought he was using.
     Although the voyage was largely free of scurvy until the latter stages, by the time the ship had been trapped in the ice for almost three years and the decision to abandon had to be faced, the condition of the crew was assessed, and Armstrong recorded, ‘I regret to say, there were none of them found free from the scorbutic taint, which was in various stages of development’. The vessel was abandoned and the crew took to the ice, enduring a 14-day trek hauling four sledges across the ice until they reached the ships Resolute and Intrepid, searching for the Franklin party.
     Twenty years later, Armstrong supervised the provisioning of an Arctic expedition under the command of Sir George Nares. As medical director-general, Armstrong had demanded the best possible lemon juice, but was either thwarted or deceived, because what was actually supplied was a commercial lime juice; the expedition was effectively destroyed by scurvy.
‘Learning from past mistakes’ seems to be an often-promised political mantra these days, although realists often react with a cynical shrug, while history nods dolefully from a dark corner. Parks Canada intends to continue the use of sonar in an attempt finally to locate the wrecks of Franklin’s ships, Erebus and Terror.
     Vitamins were first identified in the 1920s, and their many benefits to humanity are still being discovered and brought to medicine today.

David Harvie was a film editor in a past life, and now writes in a variety of guises. He is the author of ‘Limeys: the Conquest of Scurvy’ (Sutton/History Press)