Clean Slate: New Ideas for Justice & Democracy

How the Cure for Scurvy was Lost, then Found


Listen Later

Some years ago, I stumbled across a post by a man named Maciej Ceglowski, where he told the story of how the world forgot the cure to a deadly disease.

Ceglowski was re-reading The Worst Journey in the World, the account of Robert Falcon Scott’s failed 1911 expedition to the South Pole. You can read Ceglowski's excellent post here: https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

Learning the right lessons has always been the challenge of all human knowledge, and especially of scientific endeavour. We can defy reason, and gravity, but only for so long. As was once said “you can drive nature out with a pitchfork - it always comes back in.”



Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe
...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

Clean Slate: New Ideas for Justice & DemocracyBy Dougald Lamont